I spent 35 hours with The Talos Principle, and while I achieved an ending to the game that made the credits roll, there are still puzzles to complete and stories to discover. To say much more would spoil a game that rewards close attention and whose deepest pleasures lie in slowly unraveling its mysteries. (In Greek mythology, Talos was a giant made of bronze.) Like those works, this game is deeply interested in the nature of artificial intelligence and the potential of machines to reason. Dick ( cited as an influence by one of the game’s two writers). The Talos Principle’s heritage can be traced in part to the science fiction of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Blade Runner” and the writings of Philip K. The game partly functions as a reverse Turing test - a computer asking a human to prove its capacity to think, rather than the other way around. Yet while much about The Talos Principle is opaque at first, its core concerns - the nature of consciousness, the existence of God - are clear from the outset.Īs the player character types on the game’s virtual keyboards, his (her? its?) fingers reveal themselves to be robotic, and the assistant begins a series of questionnaires that ask the player to prove that he or she is a conscious being. It’s a game of puzzles, not the least of which is uncovering who you are and why a disembodied voice is speaking to you. Like so many video games, The Talos Principle begins with an amnesiac who awakens in a new world and tries to make sense of it. Here is a game that quotes Milton, Blake, Kant and Chesterton, among others, and expects you to piece together why any of it matters. The Talos Principle prompts you to meditate on the meaning of life outside the screen. The Talos Principle, released in December and one of six games nominated this month for the grand prize at the Independent Games Festival awards in March, takes their inquiries a step further. Last year’s iPhone hit Make It Rain did the same for mobile games, satirizing the emptiness of the finger swipe while also exploiting its seductiveness. Ian Bogost’s Cow Clicker sent up the meaninglessness of the virtual labor in Facebook games like FarmVille. BioShock questioned the nature of free will inside video game worlds. A few well-known games have addressed this digital anxiety, directly or obliquely. Something fundamental about video games - the way they feel like alternate universes, promising an “extra life” - brings existential questions to the fore. Play enough video games and soon you’ll start to wonder what it all means.
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