This mix of philosophy and deception engaged the player and immersed him in the game world. What are the limits to which a person should be controlled? Your own deception at the hands of Atlas later in the game show the player that he too was being deceived the entire time, not unlike how Shodan deceived you in System Shock 2. You gradually uncover a tale of a city that was founded on good and devolved into evil, leaving the player to ponder the questions of free will and control. Rapture was meant to be a safe haven for creativity but it is a wreck by the time the player finds it. These themes were further explored in System Shock 2 and more fully realised in "Andrew Ryan" - the mad genius behind the underwater city of Rapture - from the game BioShock. The game's villain Shodan mocked and taunted you at every turn, yet gave you enough to ponder over. The game was an homage to cyberpunk lore and it captured the feeling of being bogged down in a derelict spaceship perfectly. Here was a game with a fully-voiced antagonist, one that was chilling and menacing in equal parts. It was around the time of System Shock that things started to change.
Games like Metroid, Castlevania, Doom relied on atmosphere to hook you in.
THE TALOS PRINCIPLE GAMER MANUAL
Earlier, games were quite happy throwing the story in as part of the manual and giving you a setting to experience on your own.
Philosophy and games haven't been best buds since the dawn of time. You play a robot with a hint of humanity, and the ever more complicated puzzles are wrapped up in a philosophical storyline that explores materialist thinking.
THE TALOS PRINCIPLE GAMER ANDROID
The Talos Principle is a first person puzzle game, available on Windows, Mac and Linux PCs, with Android and PlayStation 4 versions expected later this year. That got me thinking, did I reject the problem because I didn't see it then, or was it because it looked too easy to be a legitimate solution. I was going around in circles looking for solutions to a problem I had inadvertently solved 20 minutes ago. It was during a particularly tricky puzzle in the Talos Principle that I realised that the game had done me in.