The Talos Principle
Worth it · Action · 2014
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $29.99, a BANGER if it drops to $19.54.
- Length
- 15.7h
- Value
- $1.91/hr
- Reviews
- 95% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 2 GB of memory, DirectX 11 class GPU with 1GB VRAM (nVidia GeForce 480 GTX, AMD Radeon HD 5870), 5 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
The Talos Principle is a first-person puzzle game in the tradition of philosophical science fiction. Made by Croteam and written by Tom Jubert (FTL, The Swapper) and Jonas Kyratzes (The Sea Will Claim Everything).
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
It has never been cheaper than $2.99. That was September 2023. Its cuts run 85 percent off as a rule. There have been 97 in the 12 years tracked, about 5 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 13 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 5 weeks. The math puts its BANGER price at $19.54. The record reaches that level 94 times.
Value puts it in the top 1 percent of the games it competes with. It is pricier than 98 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 99 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Outer Wilds ($24.99, scores 83) beats it on value, while it beats SOMA ($29.99, scores 70).
85 from critics against 95 percent from players, and the player number comes from people who own the game.
Of the 799 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 6 come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written December 2021 to September 2026. That is fewer refunded reviewers than 8 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 3,221 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 2,844 have a larger share. Inside the two-hour refund window, 73 percent of the 1,760 reviews written there were positive, against 95 percent overall, and those are 6 percent of everything written about it.
The drop-off
92% start to 5% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
117 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
Playing The Talos Principle as an adult gave me the same feeling that Portal 1 + 2 gave me as a kid. Absolute necessity for any fans of puzzle games.
This is a super fun puzzle game sprinkled with interesting philosophical questions and partial works of classic literature. Originally I thought it was too short, but 30 hours of solving puzzles ended up being just about right for me. The overarching story is thought provoking and ties everything together nicely. Well worth the buy.
Perhaps you have a tendency like me, looking at reviews trying to determine "Do I play this original version? or the remake?" I can't speak for the remake - I haven't played it (yet). Perhaps you're wondering, like I did, "Does this original 2014 game feel dated? They remade it after all." That I can speak on, and that I can assure you is not the case. This is a special little game. It could've been released a...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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The Talos Principle scores 77/100 on the BANG Score (worth it). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/257510/the-talos-principleThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 13, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.