Is The Talos Principle 2 on PS4 and Xbox One?

Developer Croteam's latest puzzle platformer, The Talos Principle 2, is finally out. The title is among the most highly anticipated releases this year, especially for fans of the puzzle-platformer genre. It is one of the very few games that are built using Epic Games' Unreal Engine 5. As a result, it boasts a massive increase in graphical fidelity compared to its predecessor while keeping the visual aesthetics of the series intact.

With the series making a jump to the latest technology, many fans may be wondering whether The Talos Principle 2 is available on the previous generation of consoles (Xbox One and PS4) or not. Unfortunately, the sequel is exclusive to current-generation consoles, i.e., PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.

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The Talos Principle 2 is not on PS4 and Xbox One, but there's still a way to play the game on those consoles

The biggest reason The Talos Principle 2 won't be on the previous generation of consoles is its use of Unreal Engine 5, which, for all intents and purposes, the PS4 and Xbox One systems cannot handle efficiently. Unreal Engine 5 is optimized to take advantage of the faster storage and CPUs to deliver some truly breathtaking visuals.

However, given the PS4 and Xbox One systems are designed with HDDs in mind, and despite being capable of using SATA SSDs, their CPU architecture and limited memory pool won't be able to make full use of the SSD. Even the GPU on the PS4 and Xbox One isn't capable of handling UE5 due to its very limited shared VRAM.

Additionally, The Talos Principle 2 makes use of Unreal Engine 5's core technologies, i.e., Lumen and Nanite, both of which are very heavily taxing, even on the current generation systems. Due to these reasons, the sequel to The Talos Principle is not something that will ever make its way to PS4 and Xbox One.

However, if you still want to play the game on the previous generation console hardware, you can do so via cloud streaming. Both Xbox One and PS4 support cloud-streaming games, with some minor caveats.

For cloud streaming on Xbox One, you will need to be an active subscriber of Xbox Live or Game Pass, which is also necessary for online multiplayer.

Cloud streaming next-gen games on PS4 is a bit counterintuitive since it requires you to own a PS5. You can stream games locally from the PS5 Remote Play app to your PS4 and play them. However, this only works if you own the game on the same account and have it installed on a PS5 connected to the same Wi-Fi or ethernet network.