As the expansion to The Talos Principle, my review on that game is worth referencing before you even consider the DLC; this DLC, while it is independent of the main game, assumes that the player has played the original game. As such, this review contains spoilers. Turn back now and read my review of The Talos Principle if you’re debating whether or not to purchase the game, but take away this message from this review – the Road to Gehenna is not an essential addition, features none of the characters who received extensive characterization in the main game, and it’s major attraction is more (and more difficult) puzzles rather than the philosophizing and discovery of the main game.
Everyone gone who hasn’t played the Talos Principle? This review seriously contains spoilers for that game, and it is best discovered on its own.
The events of the game take place after the end of the original game. Uriel, one of Elohim’s messengers, is tasked to go to Gehenna, a place where Elohim banished all the AI processes who didn’t follow his orders. This is the total sum of your interaction with Elohim; he speaks a few lines at the beginning and a few lines at the very, very end, but he receives no real additional characterization or focus.
Instead, this game focuses on the AI processes who are banished to Gehenna. The only way to interact with them is via their message boards, which they’ve set up on the terminals in Gehenna. As you free the various AI processes, you get more messages to read and possibly respond to on the boards, and uncover the secret of Gehenna.
Except that the secret is pretty obvious from the get-go – Gehenna is like any other internet community, and the game sort of centers around the situational irony/humor of reading a bunch of people in a community talking to each other on a messageboard, with its own internal rivalries and characters and such.
The problem is, this just isn’t very engrossing – your interactions with most of the characters is fairly sporadic, and there are 17 AI processes (plus Uriel himself) whom you interact with. The result is that none of them are particularly well-characterized, and while it works okay, I was not left caring about almost any of the characters. Honestly, only MrMulciber ended up seeming all that interesting, and while Admin was in principle interesting, in practice he is simply not developed well enough over the course of the game, nor does he exhibit the sort of personality you saw out of the Milton Library Assistant in the first game.
Moreover, because it is extremely obvious from early on what is going on, the game is basically entirely lacking in any sort of mystery or discovery. In the first game, you gradually uncover what is going on, as well as what your purpose is and why you are doing the things you’re doing, and what the purpose of the world is. Here, you hold all the answers from the beginning of the game, and over the course of the game you can comfort others as you free them (via the messageboard terminals; you cannot directly interact with anyone).
As a result of this, the game does not feel like it has anywhere near the same weight as the original game; the frame story is only mildly interesting and lacks the same sense of discovery or accomplishment, and there’s no mystery how it is all going to end. Indeed, the ending is extremely bare bones and weightless; there’s no final set of interactions with the NPCs before ascension to sum everything up, nor is there a particularly interesting or in-depth discussion with Admin in the same vein as what you got out of Milton. You don’t really care about Admin, who is the only character you have any meaningful choice with, and even that choice feels weightless because you just don’t care about him, and the whole ending only barely changes, with a few different words being spoken.
That being said, while this game’s story is weak, the puzzles here are actually quite good. As noted in my review of the original game, The Talos Principle seems like it runs out of ideas halfway through, then actually starts doing interesting things with puzzles again at the end. The Road to Gehenna proves that they actually had lots more interesting ideas for puzzles, as all of the puzzles in Road to Gehenna are fresh and interesting uses of the pieces from the original game. The puzzles in this are pretty thinky, and most of them don’t actually take that long to complete, unlike the long marathon puzzles which appeared at some points in the first game. Instead, they require you to use a few parts in a clever way. It is all about thinking about the puzzle pieces in new ways, and coming up with clever ways to solve puzzles which seemingly give you one fewer piece than they should. They also encourage you to abuse the level design in order to succeed, in ways that the original game mostly reserved for star puzzles.
There are 16 main puzzles, plus 16 star puzzles and 8 bonus puzzles which can be unlocked by collecting at least 10 of the stars.
That being said, the puzzles aren’t perfect; while most of the star puzzles are better than the ones in the original game insofar that you can see the stars and the trick is figuring out how to get there, there still are a few hidden stars which basically constitute “run around searching for someplace that might have a star hidden in it.” These are just as annoying as they are in the original, and there are a few star puzzles which can only be solved by finding objects hidden around the levels in obscure locations, rather than jailbreaking – nothing is more annoying than trying to solve a puzzle, only to realize that the reason it is so difficult is that you’re missing one of the pieces which was hidden somewhere in the level, rather than because you weren’t thinking laterally enough.
That being said, there were fewer such puzzles in this game, though their continued presence continued to be a bother.
Still, a lot of the puzzles were good, and their solutions were mostly hard because it was hard to think laterally enough. And there were only two of those tetromino puzzles in this game, which I’m sure that people who got sick of those by the end of the game will be happy with.
So, is this game worth buying?
If you really loved the puzzles in The Talos Principle, there’s a good chance you’ll like this.
Conversely, if your main attraction to The Talos Principle was the story, this game’s story is much weaker, lacking the sense of discovery as well as depth of the original game. While it sometimes tries to be more deeply meaningful, and there’s some decent foreshadowing of the ending, in the end, I was left feeling like I didn’t care about most of the characters involved. Only interacting with people via the terminal, rather than being talked to by Elohim, finding voice logs, and reading random archives, made the game feel much less alive, and the simple text adventures present in the game did not sway me towards loving it.
Recommendation: Not Recommended unless you really loved The Talos Principle’s puzzles.
2.5