Picture yourself being born, yet having no prior knowledge of your existence (or your childhood). You were just… created. Just like that. The snap of a finger. Like a character in an MMORPG. Except, this is the dark, depressing side of life that humanity has been accustomed to. We’ve always questioned… why were we born? What is our purpose in life?
The Talos Principle – it plays on this, then throws your brain into a vice and fucks with it. It goes over things such as, “what is consciousness? Can you feel it? Does it have weight? What makes you human?”, and I’m all “holy fuck!!” This shit is deep. And indeed it is. It’s very heavy drenched in philosophical metaphors. Think of it like the mindfuck ending of BioShock Infinite (and the ‘question of free will’ in The Stanley Parable), and magnify that… five. freakin’. times. That’s The Talos Principle. With even more nose bleeds!
So, what is it? You’re re-born as an android. I personally would be trying to scream “WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO ME?!” Yet I would have no prior knowledge of my past, shitty life. It’s like I’ve been reincarnated (born again as something or someone else).
You see a weird purple door infront of you in the distance. Suddenly, a booming voice from the sky begins to speak. He claims he created you, and that you can be blessed if you complete several tasks (and enter his temple). And that you will receive eternal life.
Eternal life is one thing that most people (including myself) would really like to have. No fear of dying; of pain, sadness, depression, and all those other negative emotions. All you have to do is follow your god, who’s named Elohim(which means “god” in Hebrew). Yet.. is it right? Can Elohim be trusted?
So how do you fulfill your strange, questionable destiny to receive enlightenment and eventually live an eternal life? You got to solve puzzles. This is where the questionable and strange parts come in(that I just mentioned).
You’re asked by your god, to collect ‘sigils’ at the end of puzzles. They are Tetris-like puzzle pieces. You use these to unlock specific things. Each thing has a number of sigils you must collect.
Once you have all of the required ones, you go to were the thing is and activate a console. Here, you must place the sigils you found in a jigsaw puzzle layout.
To reach the puzzles (after doing the first three and getting to the temple), you’ll notice there’s 9 doorways with a portal inside. Each one is a Portal Hub. Each portal hub shows what blocks are available to secure via their puzzle.
There’s more than one temple. You’ll be in temple A. To access B and C, you must unlock the door to reach the elevator. There, it will take you to the main hub of all three temples. Each temple has a theme. A is ruins, B is Egypt, and C is in France.
Of the three temples, you may notice a really tall tower directly across from A. This tower, your god warns you not to go up to the top. “For you will die and ‘doom your generation'”. And that’s not what your god wants from you. He wants what’s best.
Yet, are you going to listen to some disembodied voice tell you what to do, or are you going to actually have free will and defy your god?
To achieve free will and fuck your god over, you must collect Red-colored Tetris blocks. I think you must get up to 50 of them to have access.
Also, in every puzzle hub, you’ll encounter a random computer terminal. Active ones draw your attention with a blinking eye looking at you, and having an audio tone of when the eye blinks.
Accessing the terminal, it starts off as simple MS DOS-like commands. You can also look through people’s emails for some creepy, odd reason. Going over them, it appears the human race is long gone. What happened, is still unsure to say. But it seems to affected the Internet greatly.
Anyway, there’s a way to get Admin access in these consoles. But you got to go through something that would make CAPTCHA seem obsolete. Eventually, this.. program, or person begins to talk to you through these terminals. THIS is where the mind fucking happens.
It begins to question your existence, if you’re actually a human infront of your computer, or an android.
And now…*leans back in his chair with an ice pack on his head from thinking too hard*…now… it’s questioning my flawed logic of how the world should work. If there should be equality, or people should be happy. It actually asked me before, how I would change the world.
Now as I said, it’s questioning (after I said how children or the severely disabled have the potential to contribute to society), which… actually strikes a chord with my own life. How at times I’m letting my own mental disability, control my life. Instead of doing something with my life.
Yet then it says “If someone with a severe, incurable brain injury can be classed as contributing, mustn’t we also include the cats that keep the rats at bay, or the buildings that keep us warm?”
And that’s when my brain exploded. I have no fucking clue how to respond! This game… this game throws things at me that I just don’t want to deal with. And at times, the game makes me just want to laugh at it. Like when it called me a hippie, and then said “You set the barrier to entry stupidity low.”.. now that’s harsh, but unfortunately true.
“If even the rats are getting rights now, you must have a spot on your own table left for me, right?”