It’s very much unlike the momentum obsessed final puzzles in Portal, made stronger by the game having no oddly out of place boss battles. Even dying just resets the puzzle and lets you tackle it again as much as you want, learning more with every try. These are quite good brainteasers too, allowing you to take your time and minimizing getting yourself locked out of progress – and the few times that’s possible, you have a puzzle restart button you can hold to try again. The game is giving you new tools at a regular pace too, keeping things from becoming stale right when it’s headed in that territory. Solving puzzles is based around using the tools in the given level, like the jammers that stop electronic devices like barriers and turrets, little prism stands that let you refract lasers, and even some rather high concept stuff like a replay machine. Each puzzle has a title that appears when you enter them, usually giving a hint to the solution. Instead of a funnel to the end, you go through various level hubs and beat puzzles to earn collectibles to unlock more, mainly tetrominoes called “sigils” used for lock puzzles. Perhaps the best comparison is Portal, but the focus on portals shifted to lasers. Also worth noting the Serious DLC, which replaces that virtual god with Sam “Serious” Stone, originally an April Fools joke that you can now patch it for three bucks. There’s also a DLC campaign from another character perspective that further fleshes all this out as well. You can see the hope at the edge of disaster narrative bones of Serious Sam 4 forming here, though while that game was more interested in the emotional reality, this one tries to work through it with thought. Every ending is interesting to boot, including an extra one unlocked for finding hidden stars and beating extra puzzles that brings up an interesting counterpoint to the regular best ending. There’s constant questioning about what it means to be a person, what consciousness is, and all that jazz, getting to the heart of the question often requiring you to go against the seemingly benevolent god ruling your reality. The Talos Principle is fascinating if you’re into philosophy, as the other intelligence you chat with is often most interested in debating you. Needless to say, it is far more complicated then it first seems. That gets answered slowly by reading files from various computers scattered around the world, talking with another intelligence through said computers, and a few audio logs scattered around. The amount of glitching gives away that this world is artificial, but it’s not clear what the role of your character is or why this world exists. You play as some sort of android in a realm controlled by a voice in the sky that acts like a god, able to control the world around you. In play and narrative, however, it is indeed a completely different beast and arguably one of the best puzzle games made in the past decade. Even the minigun laser turrets from SS3 make a return. This is kind of funny because there’s a ridiculous amount of Serious Sam DNA left over, ranging from the near exact level of movement from Serious Sam 3 to reused graphical assets and even sound effects, including the iconic kamikaze yell. The game that resulted was The Talos Principle, the most critically acclaimed game Croteam have ever put out, and a steady seller for years due to the shift to puzzles giving it a completely different audience appeal from Serious Sam, something that wasn’t just an event to front load but something unique that caught tons of word of mouth over time. The latter did such a great job with this new game that he landed lead writer for Serious Sam 4, and he more than earned it. Croteam even brought on two new writers, Tom Jubert (who was the narrative designer for Driver: San Francisco) and Jonas Kyratzes, a German indie game developer and writer. The team ended up making complicated puzzles with these new development toys, so the team decided to make a new IP that would allow them to go all out with this, putting Serious Sam 4 on the back burner awhile longer. People liked what they had, but they also didn’t feel like these were gameplay elements that belonged in an explosive mob shooter. After Serious Sam 3 released, Croteam put out a short little experiment with various mechanics they were toying with for a possible Serious Sam 4.
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