SPOILER WARNING: This preview will cover The Talos Principle 2’s latest DLC pack, “Road to Elysium”, which tale place after the main scenario of The Talos Principle 2. Though I will ensure that no major spoilers are posted about the main game, being post-game content inevitably means that I might walk over some plot points of The Talos Principle 2. Proceed at your risk of what I consider one of gaming’s extremely fantastic and clever philosophical puzzlers ever. Seriously, read up about it and go play it.
You’ve been warned!
Croteam’s ‘The Talos Principle 2’ is fantastic. It is a wonderful puzzle adventure title that is reasonably paced, offers plenty of challenge, and spins players through a web of struggle and confusion in a society on the verge of a turning point. It’s an engaging plot all the way til the end, and with ‘Road to Elysium’, players can come back to the remnants of earth—with new challenges, a bit of catch up with the main cast, and potential sequel baits.
Road to Elysium is a three-part campaign expansion pack that covers events that happened during and after the events of The Talos Principle 2. I was told that each chapter runs for about five hours give or take, and that I only cover a portion of the “Isle of the Blessed” chapter. Considering that gaming this time of the year becomes rather hectic, I was more than happy to spend only a bit of time in the exotic island that this chapter was based in.
In the Isle of the Blessed chapter, players step into the shoes of the self-conscious but capable Yaqut of the main cast. This time, he’s the one solving puzzles and mining the rest of the team for details about what they’ve been up to past the main scenario. We’re on Barzai’s giant beautiful Carribean island now, and there are three sectors of the map that contain 10 puzzles, shrines of the Greek gods, sparks to chase, the whole shebang. Obviously very reminiscent of the original game, but now we can ask Barzai why he decided to make a giant island full of puzzles.
To which Barzai replies, “Why not?”.
This is a relaxing expedition now, nothing like the original scenario’s somber world-building of a peoples long gone. With Yaqut at the helm, he’s free to do the puzzles at his own pace. 1k, the main playable character of the original scenario, has long-completed all the puzzles on the island—bloody showoff, but more importantly, he can talk! He has opinions and the writing team even gets a bit cheeky with how they present his dialogue in-line with what players expect themselves to speak like. Don’t expect anything gnarly though, 1k is very formal. The rest of the cast is also mumbling about to themselves, with some having a few relationship problems that I imagine will inevitably solve themselves over the course of the chapter. All in all, a very “chill” vibe comes packed in with this chapter and I love it. It’s a great change of pace, and even gets around to asking the player “Why do we need a reason to create?”.
As for the puzzles, I was asked to only go through the “red” clusters of puzzles on the map. There are green and blue sectors that, once completed, will connect to this giant prismastic-like cube sitting right in the middle of the map. It’s no megastructure, but it’s huge and can only be solved once you’ve activated all the lights across sectors. So I didn’t bother approaching it—instead, I spent roughly two hours completing the puzzles on the red side of the island.
No surprise, these puzzles used all the mechanics from the base game. Lasers, RGB conversion, energy points, fans, all that good logic-crunching and tight physics-based puzzle solving is here. There is a decent challenge here especially if you found yourself stuck on puzzles in the base game here and there. One of my favourites on this side of the map involved the anti-grav wall mounts, which had me flip my worldview a good few times to figure out how to best point lasers where they needed to go and how to best transport you and your tools behind locked-off areas proper.
There are two hidden puzzles in the far reach of the map, one of which I took advantage of as puzzle number six (was it five?) had me stumped. Blasted fans. Of course, there are sparks to collect and those will naturally cover for the puzzles that you simply can’t figure out.
With the few hours that I had, I knew I was right at home with this upcoming DLC. It’s more of The Talos Principle 2, which if you loved you’ll love this. The other chapters (names withheld as I’m not sure if I can mention them) cover two key parts of the base game that I will definitely get around to experiencing when my review and other backlogs begin to cool down. These other chapters are also advertised as trickier, which is a point of interest for fans looking for a greater challenge (and especially those hardcore Talos 1 fans).
Plus, the base game has gotten a number of patches, adding QoL and more settings for the PC version. They’ve even fixed one of my grievances—save file backups! For what you get with The Talos Principle 2, its price point may as well be theft. And the Road to Elysium is easily icing on the cake.
Road to Elysium is $19.99 USD and will launch on the 14th of June for PC via Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox Series consoles.
