Very nice follow up to the original game. It finds a clever way to prolong its odd brand of post-humanity philosophical sci-fi story. I found it a little bit less fascinating than the first game on that front. Both stories, from the point of view of the protagonist, are about trying to understand wtf is going on and I feel the rabbit hole was deeper and more surprising in the first game. I also wonder if it still hits or totally misses if you play Talos 2 first. Still, better than 99% of what passes as stories in video games.
On the puzzle front, it's a pretty fun game but somewhat on the easy side (disclaimer: I am pretty good at puzzle games). It's not an issue per se, as many puzzles, while not that hard, are elegant in their solution, so they remain satisfying and enjoyable. Out of the 150ish puzzles (counting all types), there is only a handful that are dubious (softlock potential or cheesable or tedious or finnicky). The worst one for me: I had to check a spoiler for one of the environmental puzzle because it was of the "find an item that can be anywhere on the gigantic map" variety... there was somewhat of a hint, but the hint itself was extremely easy to miss and you basically had one shot to notice it.
The structure is a tad too mechanical for my taste. I kept expecting for the formula to be subverted at some point, but no (well... there is a slight deviation with heavy narrative consequences, but that's about it). All 12 areas are structured similarly, so even if the scenery is wildly different and the gimmick of the set of puzzles changes, there is no real feeling of exploring the unknown.
It's not a super impressive game technically speaking (to each their pet peeve, for me the thing that bothered me a little was the canned animations during the npc conversations), but it does the job and it's more about the architecture and the scale of things than about pushing pixels and polygons.
The DLC for the first game was great. I hope there will be a DLC for this one too and I'll be there for it!
