The Talos Principle 3 is coming, and I’m very excited: What initially attracted my attention as a sideshow curiosity from the Serious Sam guys quickly proved itself a clever puzzle game powered by an unexpectedly compelling and thoughtful narrative. I like it a lot! And so it’s kind of a bummer that Croteam insists, with absolute certainty, that the third will be the last.
It’s unusual in the world of videogames (or movies, or television, or any other popular media built for consumption) to say “no more,” but writer Jonas Kyratzes told me during a recent chat that Croteam doesn’t think of Talos Principle as “a franchise that will go on and on and on.” Instead, the studio had a broad concept of how it wanted to tell the story across three games, and now, “This is the end. This is the last Talos Principle.”
“We might do some small spinoff one day or something like that, but the story of Talos Principle ends with three,” Kyratzes said.
“So many videogames just don’t end, and then you have an endless kind of cliffhanger or whatever, and there’s no satisfying conclusion to the story. And then at some point the company closes, and this story is never completed. And with Talos Principle, that’s not what we want to do. We want to tell the story and then be done with it … Really, the idea is to have a complete work—the way that we look at it is that this is one thing. It’s one story in three parts. And when it’s done, I think that will also kind of be visible. That was the kind of the intent.”
Game director Davor Hunski said that if Talos Principle 3 is on par with the first two games in the series—and I don’t think there’s any expectation it won’t be, but you never want to be overconfident about these things—it will make The Talos Principle “one of the best” videogame trilogies, and more broadly, “really, really special in gaming,” even though puzzle games are a relatively niche genre.
“We have Serious Sam, right? We’ve been developing Serious Sam for 20 years,” Hunski said. “But Talos Principle is on a different level of emotion, and people’s engagement and reaction. Life-changing stuff actually gets reported to us through feedback, through emails—very personal life-changing, moving stuff.”
Serious Sam, the ‘other’ Croteam game, is indeed a very different sort of experience—a hyper-violent FPS that revels in excessive bloodshed and the preternaturally thick skull of its hero. I’ve been a Serious Sam fan since the original in 2001 and remain so to this day, but on a deeper, this game matters level, The Talos Principle is the one that’s stuck with me.
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“It is a very particular game. It is a very unique kind of thing, and people have very powerful responses to it,” Kyratzes added. “I mean, it’s not the only game that has that, but it’s certainly very gratifying and beautiful that people respond very strongly to this kind of humanist spirit of it, and that they’re moved by it and they care about it. And again, that’s why you don’t want to treat it as a franchise, where it’s a burger, and you make another burger, and then you make another burger.
“The story is told. The things that we wanted to do are accomplished. Hopefully it’s satisfying as an arc, from the beginning of new humanity to its distant future. And that’s that. And then you can play it, and you can have this beautiful experience. You can be happy with it.”
