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by 0cf8612b2e1e 105 days ago
Not sure there is anything to take away from Talos Principle 2. It was a puzzle + philosophical musings adventure. Could have achieved the same effect with Quake level graphics. So much needless vast (pretty) landscape you had to circumnavigate just to get to the next puzzle arena.
1 comments

Compared to generic Serious Sam like maps of TP1, I found beautiful environments of TP2 really added another level of appreciation to the game. Those and the music surface up in my memory couple times a week, very few games had this effect on me - maybe only TES3. The game is magical and I'd love more of that.
Oh it was definitely beautiful, it just never seemed relevant to what was happening. More like the art team run amok. TP1 at least had an in universe explanation for the shape of the world.

Spoilers…kinda

I guess Athena and crew have invented literal universe manipulation powers? Allowing them to craft whatever beauty they see fit. Yet, their living quarters always seem to be some dingy basement lab with power cables and other miscellaneous garbage strewn about. The wondrous environments seemed fully disconnected from everything else in the world.

If they had the time and the budget, go nuts, but the game would have been perfectly suitable with significantly lower fidelity graphics.

A lot of the game was spent walking from puzzle to puzzle. I think prioritising graphics was a good choice, because one was forced to notice the landscape.