Don't just write that here, man! Put that incredibly useful information in a review! =D

Pretty much the same with me, I played Talos Principle after the Stanley Parable and, while they are not exactly similar games, I felt more like a chore to finish the game compared to the enthusiasm of finding new routes and being mind fucked by the Stanley Parable.
Maybe I am missing a lot by not finishing the Talos Principle, maybe one day?

Edit: just remembered that regarding puzzle games with story, I enjoyed much more the first Portal game than the second, not sure if it's because the first is somewhat very short and the second drags a bit. Both great games though.

Developers. everywhere, are increasingly jumping on the "UE5" or "Unity" bandwagon, as it seems to make stuff easyer for them using a "normalized" environment. On the other hand, we start to see less diversity when it comes to the engine and somehow the unique touch may slowly become lost. The textures are still unique of course but somehow the tools used for it are slowly becoming "equal" in some way... so in the end the graphical diversity is somehow becoming reduced.

Even Square Enix was using UE4 for a lot of games, although, on FF16 they was using a rare custom engine still.

I think Talos 1 and Talos 2, both are graphically impressive. Taken into account the first Talos is already 9 years of age it is actually even the winner. Anyway, Talos is Talos... even the newest Title is another great game on a great engine which is demanding a lot of resources.

From what I remember back then, the Talos Principle was used as a graphic benchmark, both by computer parts benchmarkers because it was heavy and game "journalists" because the high fidelity at the time.

Got this on steam as I wasn't sure it would make it here, but now...

YOINK!

Anothert game for my de-steamed pile ironically located in my steam launcher! x^D

Very true. Added an edit to my previous post. Just to sum up - Croteam lost their main engine guy in 2019, which I think led to the death of Serious Engine.

Serious Engine 3 (and 3.5) overall felt more polished than 4.

https://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/serious_sam_2
https://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/serious_sam_3_bfe
https://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/serious_sam_hd_the_first_encounter
https://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/serious_sam_hd_the_second_encounter

I'm happy for everyone here who's into this kind of game.
I saw a first review and it said it's a really, really good and well-designed title. But unfortunately it's not really my cup of tea so I might buy it sometime in a deep sale.

Honestly, I think it makes a lot of sense that most devs should not reinvent the wheel and use an existing engine, especially if they are not highly knowledgeable about that to begin with.

This is such a common base for games and yet, also a huge very technical overhead, plus not a huge differentiation for a lot of games (unless you approach it with a lot of technical expertise and a singular vision, you're unlikely to do a better job than existing established game engines with the time you have).

Realistically, the creation of game engines should probably rightfully be delegated to either communities of tinkerers or studios with deep pockets and lots of resources to hire teams with the right know-how.

So I understand why smaller studios like them would want to explore existing solutions.

My main beef with unreal/unity situation is: Why aren't there more established open-sources alternatives yet and why aren't more devs using them? This kind of common widespread building block need tends to be the most fertile ground for robust open-source solutions to emerge where a lot of people contributes to said solutions (with time or money) because it fulfills their needs and that spreads the load a lot.

No typo. 21 files for the main game, 19 of which are 4GB each.
DLC is 8 files, 6 of which are 4 GB each.
Then there are the OST and Artbook, about 400 MB each.

Thankfully, here where I am in the US, GOG at least stuck this game on a fast server. Most games I get only around 4 or 5 MB/s, but for big name titles, it is much faster. For this game, about half of the files were at around 12 MB/s, while the other half was thankfully at 35 to 41 MB/s.

I post that in case anyone else is near me with similar download stats, and is hesitating on this game because of it. I had the entire Deluxe Edition offline installer files manually downloaded in just over an hour.
Thank you for all the reference links in your posts. I for one appreciate it!

Reading one of your links, I see that Alen Ladavac, Croteam's CTO, hooked up with Google Stadia team in 2019.
And digging around a bit more, I see that apparently now he's working at Roblox:
https://x.com/alenl?lang=en

Great, the first Talos has to be one of my favorite puzzle games, that said after checking some footage I find Talos 2's levels to be unnecessarily massive and detailed, not sure what's going on with that lol

Guess next time they should make it less massive and less detailed... and even better bringing the game over to the Switch so they can do it without looking poor. They should not go PC anymore, to much unnecessary details here, to much size everywhere... even the system itself, what a mess!

They should lurk to Nintendo and telling them: Hey Nintendo, we finally was realizing our "wrongdoings" considering our way to bloated game-directions, way to much graphics, to much size, to much of everything... now we want to step down which is actually a "step up" with every step we go down, the Nintendo-paradox; so let us please become part of this family and lets praise the big success together!

Does anybody who played both Talos games knows how long each part is?