![]() ![]() ![]() John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress comes to mind. Christians are rightly cautious of the error of adding to or taking away from what the Bible says - including being more or less clear on some point than the Bible is - but on the other hand the Bible itself is full of poetry and and even apocalyptic literature which we're not supposed to engage with in a "straightforward" way, and whilst modern attempts to discuss Christianity through poems or stories or even games won't be Scripture, they could nonetheless be helpful to the Christian. Kyratzes lamented the trend among Christians to shy away from poetic or artistic ways of trying to get into the guts of the Bible. The review came to the attention of one of the game's writers, Jonas Kyratzes, who wrote a lengthy response to the review (check out the comments section) which is a fascinating read by itself. The reviewer, Michael Desmond, raised an objection that to get the "proper" ending of the game, you have to defy God and, figuratively speaking, eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This by itself would be enough for me to want to write a blog post about TTP, but the other reason is that it was reviewed earlier this year by a Christian review site called. The other is a religious one: "in the book of Genesis, why did God put the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden of Eden?" Why did God make it possible for humanity to reject him? After all, it famously didn't turn out well, so the question of why the tree was there at all has puzzled pretty much everyone who's thought about the opening chapters of the Bible for any length of time. The concept of the Talos Principle feeds into this. One is a straight philosophical question: "what does it mean to be a person?", to which the game presents a materialist answer the physical world is all there is, and there's nothing special about meat and neurons, so you can just as easily build a person out of silicon and transistors. The major questions in The Talos Principle (TTP) are not small ones. (Game: Croteam, All screenshots: Chris Knowles) It's well worth a look if you haven't played it and you're into puzzle games. The game also manages to be hauntingly beautiful, full of ruins and with a slow, rather mournful soundtrack. We do have things like the Deus Ex series, which asks us what kind of world we want to live in when human augmentation with machines becomes possible, but it's a sparse field. I wish more major games developers did things like this - produced games designed to make us think (and not just about solving puzzles). As well as being an excellent puzzle game, it's a deeply philosophical game. Without a shadow of a doubt, The Talos Principle is my favourite game of 2014. ![]()
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