In 2012, Serious Sam developer Croteam made its mark on the puzzle game genre with a riff on Portal that traded in physical comedy for philosophical musing. As if its exceptional puzzles weren’t brain-bending enough on their own, The Talos Principle looked for higher purpose in a hard sci-fi story that searched for signs of humanity in a world populated by cold androids. It kicked gaming’s dystopian instincts to the curb to deliver an optimistic exploration of artificial intelligence.
You can see where this is going. Fourteen years later, the team is hard at work on the series’ grand finale, The Talos Principle 3. It's being created in a very different context than either of its predecessors; what once was pure sci-fi has now become an inescapable anxiety, thanks to the very real rise of generative AI. That’s left Croteam frustrated as its thematic intent has gradually been muddied by LLMs, but the studio isn’t changing course because of a few chatbots. It’s going to finish The Talos Principle story the way it always intended to.
Image: Croteam/Devolver Digital
The Talos Principle launched in 2012 to immediate critical acclaim. It was praised for its brainy puzzles, which had players juggling gadgets, and for its thoughtful story about transhumanism. It was followed by The Talos Principle 2 in 2023, and a remake of the first game dubbed The Talos Principle: Reawakened in 2025. Earlier this year, Croteam announced that it would end the series with The Talos Principle 3, though it has only gotten a small teaser trailer so far. While details are sparse for now, Croteam gave Polygon an idea of what to expect from the ending.
The story takes place in The Anomaly, a mysterious space where the laws of physics don’t apply. Androids are drawn to it, with some believing they will find God there. You play as a member of an expedition gone wrong, who winds up stuck in The Anomaly watching their past experiences recreated by the place. Croteam said that the idea was conceived during development of the first game, with the intent being that each game would explore a piece of a life cycle: birth, life, and death.
“What drew me to the story is this discussion of: Do you believe in life after death, or don't you? Is it something to be afraid of, or can you find hope in that? Is there a continuity of the soul?” Verena Kyratzes said. “I'm not necessarily saying that I believe in that, but I think it's a very interesting discussion to have. Maybe if you've lived a good life, then the next step isn't so scary anymore.”
“You will get older,” Hunski said, piercing my ironic veil through the screen. “You will change your opinion.”
“If you were 100 years old, but your body was 24?” Jonas Kyratzes followed up. “A lot of the time it's like people are like, ‘Oh, I don't want to live a thousand years because I would have to work for a thousand years.’ Your problem is your job! The problem is you're extremely alienated from your labor! The problem is not that you don't want to live a thousand years!”
Fair play, but you can’t blame me for being exhausted by the current state of the world. High among my own list of concerns at present is the tech industry’s generative AI craze, which threatens to upend that labor problem by forcibly ejecting those alienated workers from their jobs. It’s hard to be optimistic about where that could lead if left unchecked.
We tell this story because we think that a lot of people don't have hope.
“I actually think that the issue is that people have been annoying me with that since the first game,” he said.
For Jonas, The Talos Principle isn’t interested in figuring out how the tech could or should work, but rather using it to ask questions about humanity. He’s more interested in discussing materialism, and asking if consciousness is something that can be created by human beings by arranging matter in the correct order. Even if those questions did intersect with today’s tangible discussions, the tech we’re interacting with today isn’t the AI he’s talking about.
“We have this weird phenomenon where we call things artificial intelligence that aren't artificial intelligence, and now we're all talking as if we had artificial intelligence,” he said. “That creates a very weird thing where we've been given a linguistic version of the future, but we haven't been given an actual future. We have the signifier, but not the signified. It's a bit like if you told me we had warp travel, but it was just a tunnel. We have something very interesting in LLMs and in machine learning, but also we have a bunch of dumb companies randomly spending tons of money that they don't know how to make back.”
Image: Croteam/Devolver Digital
There are still places where The Talos Principle 3 intersects with generative AI debates, though indirectly. Jonas said that, like The Talos Principle 2, the third installment is about “imagining a better world and imagining better applications of technology.”
“We see the lives that these beings live. And a theme that recurs in the game is that they live relatively ordinary lives,” he said. “Some of them go to great extremes — one of them becomes a planet — but a lot of others live an ordinary life because an ordinary human life, if you strip away the problems that we have in our society, is a very good thing. The idea that an artificial intelligence would be something very alien to us is something that the games oppose... There's a recurring concept in the games that what they're trying to do is not to be more than human, but to be more human.”
That’s where Croteam’s optimism comes in. Hunski noted that the series was originally inspired by Star Trek and astronomer Carl Sagan. It’s not cynical, nor does it present its robot civilization as a dystopia. It’s more nuanced than that, and that flows from the compassion that the team has for human beings.
Image: Croteam/Devolver Digital
“We tell this story because we think that a lot of people don't have hope, because they don't see the hope,” Verena said. “A lot of the narrative out there — not just in games, but movies, books, et cetera — is dystopian. If we don't tell those stories, then people will not believe that there is still hope. I look out there, and I also think, okay, we're screwed. But what if we weren't? What if enough people could hope again so that something could change?”
“I know that Talos Principle is just one game against this giant flood of dystopian narratives, but we have to start somewhere.”