Well, I just finished The Talos Principle 2, or rather I finished the last DLC. I took several breaks during playing, some of them several weeks long. I must say I was a bit disappointed overall.
The atmosphere of isolation and existential dread is gone, which is ok I guess. I think maybe they tried making you feel like an explorer instead, but they didn't quite succeed in my opinion.
The puzzles are mostly good, I'd say. But there were too many puzzles where I was softlocked if I made a mistake, forcing me to reset. I didn't like that.
The music is good and there is more variation than in the first game, but it didn't grab me like it did in the first.
Some people don't like dialogue in the game. Yes, most of it feels very shallow. That didn't really bother me as much as the fact that there is way too much dialogue in the game. I mean, sure I appreciated some of the characters, but still...
Now to the thing that made me loose patience and soured me on the game: the walking. There are great distances between puzzles. Yeah, sure, the first few times I was in awe of the beautiful vistas but they lost their novelty fast. THere was so much walking, walking, walking, walking... I'm usually very stubborn and I like to spend a long time trying to figure a difficult puzzle, but all the walking associated with backtracking to unsolved puzzles wore me out and I started looking at hints/walkthroughs much earlier than I usually do in puzzle games. And far too many of the levels are designed like a circle with only a few paths between them: say that I'm at puzzle 2 and want to get to puzzle 7, the distance between them is actually short if I could walk in a straight line, but Haha the joke is on me, there is a ravine or water between them that kills me if I try, so I have to walk on the path passing 3, 4, 5, 6 to get to 7. There's a "fast travel" system but it's shit. This issue kindof killed the game for me.
There was this one time I managed to smuggle a teleporter out of the puzzle it was in and I was excited with all the shenanigans I thought I could do with it, only to realize that it stopped working as soon as it left the puzzle area. Disappointing.
I liked the first DLC, but the regular puzzles where too easy. So easy that I felt I didn't learn or understand exactly how the new mechanics work. I calculated that for the first 16 puzzles I spent an average of 5 minutes on each. Now the three superhard puzzles, I managed to solve one (unsure if I did it the way the developers intended or if I accidently exploited a bug?) but I looked up help on the other two after spending a long time not succeeding by myself. Thankfully there is less walking, that's a big reason why I like this one.
The second DLC suffers from the same issues as the base game, too much walking and too much dialogue. Not much else to say. Like the base game I lost patience and started looking up help early.
The third DLC I liked a lot. Puzzles are short distances away mostly and the fast travel system is actually good! Why didn't they do it like that earlier? The puzzles are very hard though. I managed to beat 18 of them (that's 75%) before I looked up help, still had problems with some of them though.
Closing words: I feel like they focused too much on beautiful scenery and story/dialogue when the reason we play the game is the puzzles. Now the puzzles aren't bad per se, but all the walking and talking actually makes the game worse.
