The Talos Principle: Reawakened goes back to the beginning for a touching coda to its musings on what it means to be human

I’m a big fan of the Talos Principle games, and so was happy to hear that the original, now more than 10 years old, was getting the remaster treatment as The Talos Principle: Reawakened. And it’s not just a graphical overhaul: The updated edition also features an entirely new chapter that takes players back to the very earliest days of the simulation that brought about the rebirth of humanity.

The Talos Principle: Reawakened, redone in Unreal Engine 5, looks great: I recall the original being a very pretty game for its time but even so, this is a big step up. There’s also an array of new quality of life and accessibility features, and a new puzzle editor that enables players to easily create and share puzzles through Steam—great for people who just want to jump in and bang around with lasers, blocks, and fans, without getting all wrapped up in philosophy.

If you’re new to The Talos Principle, this is definitely the version to play. As someone who’s already been through it, though—and who was really taken by the narrative—the big hook here is the addition of a new chapter called In the Beginning. And from here, there are spoilers, so avert your gaze if you don’t want to blow the big secret.

The Talos Principle takes place in a world where humanity has been rendered extinct by some unknown pandemic. With a cure out of reach (a prospect I find much more believable in the wake of Covid-19), a small number of humanity’s best minds spent their final days working to set the stage for a rebirth of human life in the form of machines, whose AI minds would be carried across the threshold of true humanity through the experience of play.

The stories of the scientists behind this effort could be glimpsed in The Talos Principle games through audio logs and forgotten bits of code, but it was left almost myth-like within the context of the game, which is experienced entirely from the perspective of androids who exist long after humanity’s demise. The new chapter in The Talos Principle: Remastered, entitled In the Beginning, shifts the focus to those long-dead humans: It takes place during a test of the simulation that will ultimately birth true machine intelligence, conducted while Alexandra Drennan and most of her team are still alive.

The puzzles in In the Beginning are tough: Name notwithstanding, this is definitely a chapter of the game to be played after the base game and Road to Gehenna are completed, because you’re going to have a very hard time of it if you’re not well familiar with the game’s puzzle mechanics. But the real attraction, for me at least, lies in what it reveals about the last desperate days of the simulation, through bug reports, last minute design changes, priority shifts, and various Easter eggs scattered throughout the pre-release test build.

It’s not perfect—the voice acting doesn’t really carry any sense of the desperation you’d expect from people weeks or days away from inevitable death—but the stories told in these little bits of text and voice are touching, occasionally funny or heartbreaking, and very human in totality, which is exactly what The Talos Principle is all about. In one bug report, a scientist on the team struggles to figure out why audio cues aren’t working when the waveforms are clearly showing activity, until he realizes that Frank unplugged the goddamn speakers again; in another, a team member whose name may be familiar to Talos Principle 2 players reports that her symptoms have progressed too far and she can’t work anymore; it’s time to go home.

The Talos Principle: Reawakened is $40/£34/€40, which for owners of the original game might seem like a little much for a single additional chapter. Publisher Devolver Digital is offering discounts of up to 40% for people who own The Talos Principle and/or Talos 2, but only for two weeks after release. There’s some mixed reaction to that: Some fans say they’d have been happy to pay full price for such an extensive redo, others are disappointed that even with the highest discount applied, the remaster still costs more than $20 for current owners.

If you’d like to get a sample of The Talos Principle: Reawakened’s shiny new paint job, a demo remains available on Steam: Croteam said it will be removed now that the game is out, but it’s being left up for a bit so mod makers can migrate their work to the full release.