The Talos Principle 3 Revealed As A Grand Finale To One Of Gaming’s Smartest Series

The Talos Principle is one of the most indulgently smart games. Its combination of incredibly clever room-sized puzzles with deeply philosophical musings on the nature of existence, what it is to be human, and our species’ fascination with an afterlife, made it and its sequel rare treats. That’s even more strange when you recognize that they come from Croteam, developers of one of gaming’s dumbest franchises, Serious Sam. Today it’s been announced that The Talos Principle III is in development, and will be the finale to the series.

The original Talos Principle was made in Croteam’s self-built Serious Engine, ideally suited for the Greco-Roman style of the architecture and wide open spaces that under-sung engine was so great at when many other FPSs were stuck indoors. However, since then Croteam has moved to the Unreal Engine, given it’s even prettier, and they still wring out a level of beauty beyond the reach of most. Sadly, given what we have today, it’s a pretty limited teaser, we don’t really get to appreciate that as much as I’d like. But still, those three seconds of in-game footage look rather lovely.

The first Talos Principle from 2014 was set in a virtual reality world, with your bemused android character guided by a disembodied voice calling itself Elohim. A huge number of enormous first-person puzzles are set for you, claims Elohim, for your edification, but woe betide anyone who climbs the central tower. As you played, between incredibly smart puzzles about redirecting beams of light between nodes around large outdoor settings, you also found texts left behind by previous “players,” degraded notes from before some sort of presumed apocalypse, and forum arguments between other androids as they argued about the nature of the trials, existence, and religion. This was written by Tom Jubert (Subnautica, FTL) and Jonas Kyratzes (The Sea Will Change Everything, The Eternal Cylinder), and was exceptional.

The Talos Principle 2 moved things on a few years, set in New Jerusalem, the world outside of the virtual reality. Here, the player character from the first game has become a deified entity who manufactured 12 androids to build the new world, with an ultimate plan to create no more than one thousand inhabitants. Here you are number 1,000, a figure of enormous intrigue to all who were built before you, and chosen to go on a group expedition to investigate the mystical appearance of a holographic Prometheus talking of lands outside of New Jerusalem, themselves mysteriously filled with puzzles of the sorts Elohim designed.

First-person musing

Both games were excellent sci-fi stories in their own right, but also offered huge opportunities for getting deeply involved in ontological philosophy and the nature of humanity and consciousness. You could just play them like puzzle games, but they had so much more to offer. So I’m delighted to know there’s a third and final entry to come.

Things sound pretty different on the outside of The Talos Principle 3. The press release explains that at the start of the game, our character will awaken in a place called the Anomaly, “the only place in the universe where the laws of physics don’t work as they should.” Once again, you’ll have to solve puzzles while trying to work out what and where the Anomaly is. It says the game “will take you on a cosmic journey across more than a dozen worlds,” which suggests quite a turn from the confined nature of the first two games.

It hasn’t been announced whether Jubert and Kyratzes will be writing again, but it’d be a pretty disastrous choice if they weren’t. There’s no release date yet, and clearly this is just an early tease, although it still does promise the game will be coming “soon.”