The Talos Principle: Reawakened Review (Rory)
As a game, it's wonderful. It hasn't changed much from the original 2014. A few puzzles had exploits fixed or slight additions. The addition of setting freeze points where you have to record yourself doing things is a huge addition. In some of the more complicated sequences in Road to Gehenna you'd have to break out the stopwatch, it was that dire.
Speaking of dire, as a product, this is it. This uses a later version of UE5 with all of it's problems. Talos Principle 2 used an earlier version of UE5 and had direct support from Epic. It looked and ran fine. This does not. With a 5800x CPU and 3700 GPU, this struggles to look and perform well, even with ray tracing disabled. Later versions of UE5 gave up on optimization and depend heavily on AI generation techniques. You cannot turn them off here. It looks abysmal. Either it looks like the lens is covered with jelly, or the AI generated frames don't know what to do with the small details so it makes up nonsense in a highly distracting way. Additionally there's some severe input lag of a few hundred ms in some cases, even with Reflex turned on, whatever that is supposed to do. It's difficult to deal with in a puzzle game when you're trying to whip up an idea quickly to see if it works. I can't imagine how awful it feels with an actual action game.
Gosh, the terminals are abysmal. As they are printing text to the screen, the AI up scaling makes a gigantic visual mess. You cannot read the text as it appears in the screen. This is not an exaggeration. You literally cannot read it, it’s nothing but a blurred mess of pixels. Only after the text in terminals is fully on the screen statically without printing or scrolling does the AI upscaling settle and you can finally read it. And then only after a couple seconds of stillness will the blur go away. Text. We have reached a point with technology where we are so high sniffing farts where we made text unreadable. Text. The one thing computers perfected since computers existed.
There's sundry UE5 garbage things as well. The water shader reflections is done in screen space, so when a bright laser is in the same scene as some water, the water picks up on the laser and reflects it in an unnatural, distracting way. All these distractions when you're supposed to be immersed and thinking.
I couldn't do it anymore. I gave up partway through Gehenna staring at the distracting, AI dancing hallucinations around foliage when I should be thinking about the puzzle.
As an industry we should go back to and do a hard reset to UE 5.0 or 4.27 and try again. What we have now is not working.
I'm sorry Croteam. You used to be one of the greats of technical achievements for 20 years. A small team from Croatia pulling off marvels thought impossible. This is sad to see.