Good video! I loved playing through (but never finishing) Antichamber a few times in my teenage years. I dont remember if the puzzles are the best, but the way the game changes the layouts of the room felt meta and always gave me goosebumps
Underrated point that there is no difficulty setting on a puzzle game. Wow you nailed it here - "Every perceived peak is really a plateau hiding another climb to greater heights.", and "The Puzzles are so well designed there is no word for them other than elegant." And as great as this is, it's not even touching on the philosophy of the game. I agree about the radar - they should have limited some discoveries by range. Not just throw a ? mark on something a mile away. I agree this game is amazing, FIVE OUT OF FIVE BABY!! I fear the last DLC world.
based. but seriously, the puzzle labeled as "puzzle 1" in the final DLC pack is the third hardest puzzle of that area. i don't know why they made that the first one.
Well that makes me feel better! Interesting choice if that's really the case, nvery strange outlier when normally the game handles difficulty really well
Just gotta say, that puzzle took me nine minutes. The first four minutes of that were mostly just exploring the layout and being baffled at why so many people online were complaining about how hard it is. Another three minutes were spent thinking of how to actually solve it. And then the rest of the time was just spent explaining my thought process (because I was streaming), adjusting my items, and actually solving it. And I have since learned that there are at least three valid, cheese-free ways to solve it, and each solution uses a different mechanic to make the final step work. So all that makes me even more baffled as to why so many people have difficulty with it. That said, I absolutely love it; it's one of my three favorite puzzles in Into the Abyss, along with Metathesis and Alternation, even though none of those three were especially hard for me (I just thought they were elegant and satisfying). Though to be fair, I played a lot of workshop content for the original Talos Principle. Anyway, for me the hardest puzzles in Into the Abyss were 3 Oscillation (having the receivers on opposite sides of the little wall thingy _really_ screwed with my head, and I kinda stumbled upon the solution by accident), 16 Fragile Balance (it takes advantage of an awful mechanic that is unique to Talos 2 and did not work in the Talos 1 engine, and while this had already been introduced in one puzzle in the base game, I didn't realize just how free it was to execute in Talos 2, so it never crossed my mind until, again, I hit on it by accident), and 23 One-Way Link (I didn't understand the function of having the inverter locked up at the beginning and did a lot of resetting to test if there was a timing-specific component, plus I had difficulty wrapping my head around how laser pressure works when you are dealing with a single source combined with an inverter).
The algorithm brought me here because I've been watching a lot of TTP2 videos since watching the DLC. Anyway, I'll copypasta the big tl;dr comment I put on another review of the base game earlier today: For me, the original game was better in almost every way. Much better story, better music, overall better puzzles (though Talos 2 is better in terms of accessibility--it's much more conscientiously structured), and the world is _way_ less of a pain in the ass to get around in the first game. In some respects, the second game could not have been as good as the first game, and I knew that before it was even officially announced. The fact that the first game is set in a simulation allows for a level of immersion not possible in most games, where everything that happens (including glitches!) is explainable in terms of the lore and every ending is simultaneously a canon ending. So of course they couldn't have replicated that in a game set in the real world, but at the same time, eliminating death traps from puzzles while leaving death in other places was an absolutely baffling decision to me--you want to cut across this map while you're going through the tortuous paths pixel hunting for the thing you need for a star? Nuh-uh! Deep water, you drown and get a loading screen! And in terms of the lore, well, here's how the death is explained: it's a video game; pretend the death didn't happen and try again. Also, the science fiction aspect was worse to me as well. The first game was harder science fiction--pandemics, computer simulations, hydroelectric dams, even androids are much more plausible than the hand-wavy technology at the center of the sequel's story, and that hurt the sense of immersion for me as well. Again, it felt more like a typical video game. And this is gonna probably be an unpopular opinion, but the recorder mechanic in the first game blew my mind. It added a whole new dimension to the gameplay by effectively doubling the tools you have to work with, while also requiring you to think harder and plan out how you were going to use those extra tools. The clone mechanic they replaced it with almost completely eliminated that aspect of the recorder. I agree with a lot of people that the recorder could have been handled better--the PC version's fast-forward functionality is not mentioned in-game and requires you to dig through menus and map a key, and is not in the console versions at all, and that's a huge thing in terms of making the recorder less tedious to use. But they could have made that better in the sequel rather than removing that type of puzzle and that type of thought process altogether. In general, most of the new mechanics (driller, gravshifter) were kind of one-dimensional in terms of gameplay compared to the old-fashioned jammer and especially compared to connectors. Like, there are specific walls you use a gravshifter or a driller on, which limits your options and limits the amount of thought you have to put into solving a puzzle. Similarly, the hoverboard thingies follow a set path, so your options are strictly limited by design. Whereas something like a jammer worked on a lot of different things, and connectors have quite a few associated mechanics and often require you to think in three dimensions. There are certainly things that the sequel improved though: connectors are much, much better. Being able to keep connections wasn't well-documented in the PC version and wasn't even available on console, and being able to drop specific connections is also a huge quality-of-life improvement. Being able to reset completed puzzles was also great for people like me who like to test alternative solutions or just screw around inside puzzles. And the bridge puzzles, while still terrible, weren't as bad as the tetromino puzzles in the original game. But yeah, overall the first game is like a 9.5 out of 10 for me, while the sequel was like an 8.
Interesting take! I haven't played one since back when it came out but like I said in the video it didn't resonate with me like 2 did. I have been thinking about revisiting it though and your comment is definitely pushing me in that direction.
