So I should probably start explaining what this game even is, but I really don’t know where to start, so let me just walk you through the first minutes. You see some boot sequence text set across a cloudy sky, and then you wake up, blocking out the sun with what looks like a robotic hand. The game is played in FPP by default, but there’s actually a setting to switch the camera to TPP, so you can quickly confirm that you’re indeed an android. You take a look around and see that you’re in some ancient-Greek-looking garden. Few seconds pass and a voice from the sky starts speaking to you, introducing themselves as your maker, Elohim. It then instructs you to seek them in their temple, says that there are sigils hidden inside, and that your purpose is to collect them in order to attain eternal life. As you start walking you’ll encounter the first obstacle, an electric gate blocking your path. Thanks to a very limited area you have access to, exactly one interactable object available and clear text prompts, it should be easy to figure out you can use your newfound device to disable the barrier. Continue walking and you will find a floating orb and a sentry gun, and also more jammers to disable those with. In the meantime more debug text appears across the screen, and you will soon find a QR code on one of the walls. The voice will sometimes talk to you again, but it doesn’t yap non-stop, a lot of the time you’re left with just the ambience and calm music. So you just continue solving puzzles and advancing forward.
Soon you start seeing more weird things. Ghosts of androids running around just like you, labeled as “recordings”. Fragments of the world glitching in and out of existence. Audio logs of some woman scientist. Computers that act as terminals to some sort of database you can use to read text files, and to chat with someone called Milton Library Assistant that appears to be a simple bot at first, but suddenly starts asking you disturbing questions, such as “why are you following that voice in the sky?” or “how do you know you’re real”? It may occur to you that the game doesn’t have a clear goal, you keep solving puzzles to acquire sigils, but to what end? What’s the story, the context for what you’re doing? The game is not open about this by design - the presentation is meant to be tranquil, put you in a contemplative state and then either ask you philosophical questions, offer someone’s musings as food for thought, or reveal just a hint of information about what is this world you’re in, letting you solve the puzzle of it inside your head at your own leisure.
To put what makes TTP great in simple terms, it’s a fantastic combination of engaging puzzles and exquisite storytelling. The information and ideas we’re presented with are so differing and scattered that they naturally make us observant and discerning. I was very satisfied with the story, both because of what it’s actually about and also because of how much of it happens completely in the player’s head, as we put together information, come to conclusions and progressively move ideas from the realm of speculation to facts. Theming works fantastically with the gameplay and aesthetic, making the game as engaging with its smart ideas as Portal was with its humor. It also left a deeper impression on me, even if it’s not nearly as iconic.
To expand just a little on puzzle-solving, everything is about spatiality, lines of sight and finding the correct order of what to move where, when to stand at which spot and eventually open up the path to the goal. Early puzzles are mostly about just figuring out where to start and slowly unwrapping layers of the labyrinth of locks and keys, as you will have to repurpose your jammers to enable and disable different appliances, put weighted boxes on pressure plates, use reflectors to redirect laser beams, and so on. Later in the game you will often have to imagine the solution from the start, prepare everything necessary ahead of the time, and then not make any mistakes while actually performing the actions you had planned out, often only to discover that there was something you haven’t considered and you have to start from scratch. There are particular puzzles that use a tool that records your actions and let’s you play them back as a ghost, and those particularly turned out to be proper brain teasers.
Something that feels completely out of place in this contemplative puzzle game are the many silly easter eggs left in the game, many of them related to the Serious Sam series. I was able to contextualize and make sense of them, although it's still a rather bizarre choice. Another thing that I weirdly appreciate about the game is that the developers weren’t particularly obtrusive about blocking out player’s ability to omit parts of puzzles by platforming on the world’s geometry, at first I didn’t even feel like I’m doing something unintended and only later discovered that there were more “proper” solutions available. That cross-section of “eurojank” with serene presentation, smart puzzles and even smarter story resulted in a game that I’ve enjoyed very much. It’s one of my favorite tales of this type, I’ve really, really liked solving the puzzles and I appreciated the mood which the game put me into. It’s probably the one title on my list that I really wish more people tried for themselves.
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