The first game is one of my favorites of all time, so when this sequel, releasing 9 years later, was announced, I was ecstatic. And after finally finishing the game to 100% completion, I think it's good, but far from great.

Many of the puzzle ideas with the basic elements were exhausted in the first game, meaning new items needed to be added to this sequel to keep things fresh. The puzzles remain solid in quality, with some leaving me scratching my head for half an hour before finally stumbling onto a solution that was right in front of me the entire time. I have to especially give credit to some of the golden puzzles in the end-game stage, which sometimes consist of very few elements but feature extremely clever and unintuitive solutions. But the satisfaction from completing puzzles is different than the first game; the world layout isn't as neat and is instead blown up to a scale that makes it tedious to navigate. It's more of a relief to be done than it is exciting.

There is a fair amount of content here, and I avoided puzzle and monument solutions throughout my playthrough, so I'm proud of myself for that. Sometimes, I was able to bring items outside of their respective puzzles to help make Pandora monument solutions easier, which I'm not sure if I'm happy about or should be criticizing. I guess it was my choice to do so, but it's hard for me not to take the easy way out and not navigate an entire island for a single drill, for example.

The writing in this game is overbearing. If it were great, I would welcome it, but it's instead overly long, consistently drawing away from gameplay (especially in the very beginning of the game) to a frustrating extent. The first game is great in that it solely offered terminals to read, for those interested in digging into the world's story and regurgitations of classic philosophy. But here, we're forced to sit through a plot with a bunch of other characters trying to collectively decide what's best for "New Jerusalem," which culminates in an effectively inconsequential election at the end of the game.

The stars in the first game were more fun, offering bonus easter-egg-type challenges. In this game, they're relatively easy puzzles whose main source of difficulty is trying to locate their elements across huge maps. The puzzles that took me the longest to solve in the entire game were some of the Pandora monuments, where in some cases items are strewn across these massive levels, with obscurely-located connectors hidden in some random crevice that requires an eagle-eye to spot. They feel more tedious and annoying than challenging in the way that the main puzzles are.

Overall, I'm still very happy that this sequel was made, since I was such a sucker for this style of slow-paced first-person puzzling featured in the first game and always had wanted more. But this is leagues behind the greatness of the original, despite being much more ambitious.

7/10

I'll be rather short with this review.

I've played puzzle games mostly back in the day of original Myst and Syberia, but during the last decade the genre seemed to quietly die down, with no notable entries, and I lost any interest I had.

Well, this is a kick to its balls. The graphics are beautiful. World and level design is amazing. Music is beautiful. Puzzles are generally rather approachable and even a bit easier than in the first game. Lore is thick, story is solid, and the characters are memorable.

Yes, the system requirements are a bit too much, and it keeps even RX 7900 XTX quite busy, but I ran the game on 3070 Ti previously, and it was just as beautiful and playable.

This is, hands down, the most beautiful and thought-out Croteam's game to date.

Do yourself a favor and buy this gem. You won't regret that.

(Runs great under Proton: I've played only running Linux, absolutely zero issues with kernel drivers and Mesa)

After waiting for this game for so long, I was thrilled to finally get my hands on it and I wasn't disappointed.

The story is rich and moving, albeit a little sad at times. It would've felt a bit simple and naїve if it were about regular human beings, but the AI adds a little more depth to it. A fascinating continuation to the story started in The Talos Principle.

The puzzles were slightly underwhelming compared to the first installment of The Talos Principle and more so to Road to Gehenna; however, the number of featured mechanics is high and nothing really gets old and stale throughout the game.

Overall, it's a worthy successor to the first game.