Most of them require the player to do something against the established rules (e.g. There is an extra layer to the game: there are many secret stars to collect. There is still a lot of variety though, 'the non-revelatory' puzzles are good and they don't feel like filler content. While many good puzzle games try to make you realize something new in each puzzle, TTP is not afraid to play with already presented ideas in some of the arenas. I think the game is more difficult than Portals, but not dramatically. I think that might have freed the designers to include more difficult puzzles in the game. While the hubs themselves are gated, most of the time multiple puzzles are accessible and the game actively encourages the player to try something else when they are stuck. The puzzles are on par or maybe even better than in Portals in my opinion and there are A LOT of them. There is a lot more of positioning of various devices. Some thoughts: The TTP puzzle-solving mechanics mechanics are not as 'exotic' as portals but I think the way they force the player to think about the spatial relations and timing is the same as in Portal.

I'm writing the post as someone who played both Portal games and was very sceptical about this weird Serious Sam puzzle game with janky robots. I admit it's something that I found a little bit off-putting at first, 'Portal wannabe' was definitely my first impression. Not only because Portal is to first person puzzlers what Doom was to FPS games ('Doom clones') in the mid-nineties, the basic structure of TTP is the same: puzzle 'chambers', disembodied authority figure with questionable motives, traces of predecessor characters, robots, cubes which are not called cubes etc. It's impossible to talk about this game without comparing it to Portal and Portal 2. This game is getting a lot of extremely positive reviews and word of mouth right know and I think it absolutely deserves it. Ok, so I've finished The Talos Principle.

Talos principle world 2 star