What is the GOAT puzzle game?

Underrated point that there is no difficulty setting on a puzzle game. Wow you nailed it here - "Every perceived peak is really a plateau hiding another climb to greater heights.", and "The Puzzles are so well designed there is no word for them other than elegant." And as great as this is, it's not even touching on the philosophy of the game. I agree about the radar - they should have limited some discoveries by range. Not just throw a ? mark on something a mile away. I agree this game is amazing, FIVE OUT OF FIVE BABY!! I fear the last DLC world.

BASED

based. but seriously, the puzzle labeled as "puzzle 1" in the final DLC pack is the third hardest puzzle of that area. i don't know why they made that the first one.

The algorithm brought me here because I've been watching a lot of TTP2 videos since watching the DLC. Anyway, I'll copypasta the big tl;dr comment I put on another review of the base game earlier today: For me, the original game was better in almost every way. Much better story, better music, overall better puzzles (though Talos 2 is better in terms of accessibility--it's much more conscientiously structured), and the world is _way_ less of a pain in the ass to get around in the first game. In some respects, the second game could not have been as good as the first game, and I knew that before it was even officially announced. The fact that the first game is set in a simulation allows for a level of immersion not possible in most games, where everything that happens (including glitches!) is explainable in terms of the lore and every ending is simultaneously a canon ending. So of course they couldn't have replicated that in a game set in the real world, but at the same time, eliminating death traps from puzzles while leaving death in other places was an absolutely baffling decision to me--you want to cut across this map while you're going through the tortuous paths pixel hunting for the thing you need for a star? Nuh-uh! Deep water, you drown and get a loading screen! And in terms of the lore, well, here's how the death is explained: it's a video game; pretend the death didn't happen and try again. Also, the science fiction aspect was worse to me as well. The first game was harder science fiction--pandemics, computer simulations, hydroelectric dams, even androids are much more plausible than the hand-wavy technology at the center of the sequel's story, and that hurt the sense of immersion for me as well. Again, it felt more like a typical video game. And this is gonna probably be an unpopular opinion, but the recorder mechanic in the first game blew my mind. It added a whole new dimension to the gameplay by effectively doubling the tools you have to work with, while also requiring you to think harder and plan out how you were going to use those extra tools. The clone mechanic they replaced it with almost completely eliminated that aspect of the recorder. I agree with a lot of people that the recorder could have been handled better--the PC version's fast-forward functionality is not mentioned in-game and requires you to dig through menus and map a key, and is not in the console versions at all, and that's a huge thing in terms of making the recorder less tedious to use. But they could have made that better in the sequel rather than removing that type of puzzle and that type of thought process altogether. In general, most of the new mechanics (driller, gravshifter) were kind of one-dimensional in terms of gameplay compared to the old-fashioned jammer and especially compared to connectors. Like, there are specific walls you use a gravshifter or a driller on, which limits your options and limits the amount of thought you have to put into solving a puzzle. Similarly, the hoverboard thingies follow a set path, so your options are strictly limited by design. Whereas something like a jammer worked on a lot of different things, and connectors have quite a few associated mechanics and often require you to think in three dimensions. There are certainly things that the sequel improved though: connectors are much, much better. Being able to keep connections wasn't well-documented in the PC version and wasn't even available on console, and being able to drop specific connections is also a huge quality-of-life improvement. Being able to reset completed puzzles was also great for people like me who like to test alternative solutions or just screw around inside puzzles. And the bridge puzzles, while still terrible, weren't as bad as the tetromino puzzles in the original game. But yeah, overall the first game is like a 9.5 out of 10 for me, while the sequel was like an 8.