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In 2012, Serious Sam developer Croteam made its mark on the puzzle game genre with a riff on Portal<\/em> that traded in physical comedy for philosophical musing. As if its exceptional puzzles weren\u2019t brain-bending enough on their own, The Talos Principle <\/em>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\u2019s dystopian instincts to the curb to deliver an optimistic exploration of artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n You can see where this is going. Fourteen years later, the team is hard at work on the series\u2019 grand finale, The Talos Principle 3<\/em>. 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\u2019s left Croteam frustrated as its thematic intent has gradually been muddied by LLMs, but the studio isn\u2019t changing course because of a few chatbots. It\u2019s going to finish The Talos Principle story the way it always intended to.<\/p>\n \u201cIt actually spawned into this world more like an accident,\u201d Croteam CCO Davor Hunski told me when I spoke to members of the team in a video interview. The story goes that Croteam was hard at work on a new Serious Sam game, and Hunski was trying to solve a hyper-specific problem: What would be a fun way to have players unlock doors that didn\u2019t involve key cards? Hunski started playing with a device that let players jam doors, and that opened the creative floodgates at Croteam. Soon, games like Flow <\/em>became a point of inspiration for a bombastic shooter. The experimentation took on a life of its own, so Croteam spun it off into its own game and pitched it to Devolver Digital. Despite expecting to see Serious Sam 4<\/em>, Devolver enthusiastically approved the idea.<\/p>\n The Talos Principle <\/em>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<\/em> in 2023, and a remake of the first game dubbed The Talos Principle: Reawakened<\/em> in 2025. Earlier this year, Croteam announced that it would end the series with The Talos Principle 3<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n \u201cThe first game is about birth. The second game is about life. And the last game was about, you know, what comes after,\u201d writer Verena Kyratzes told Polygon.<\/p>\n The story takes place in The Anomaly, a mysterious space where the laws of physics don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat 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?\u201d Verena Kyratzes said. \u201cI’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.\u201d<\/p>\n If you\u2019ve played a Talos Principle game before, then it\u2019s likely no surprise to hear that my conversation with the team delved less into game details and more into philosophical debate. As writer Jonas Kyratzes discussed how the project deals with immortality as a concept, asking its players if they would choose to take that option if humanity cracked the code, I joked that I wouldn\u2019t want to live longer than I have to.<\/p>\n \u201cYou will get older,\u201d Hunski said, piercing my ironic veil through the screen. \u201cYou will change your opinion.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIf you were 100 years old, but your body was 24?\u201d Jonas Kyratzes followed up. \u201cA lot of the time it’s like people are like, \u2018Oh, I don’t want to live a thousand years because I would have to work for a thousand years.\u2019 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!\u201d<\/p>\n Fair play, but you can\u2019t 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\u2019s generative AI craze, which threatens to upend that labor problem by forcibly ejecting those alienated workers from their jobs. It\u2019s hard to be optimistic about where that could lead if left unchecked.<\/p>\n We tell this story because we think that a lot of people don’t have hope.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/section>\n That puts The Talos Principle in a strange position as it gears up for its final act. The series was rooted in sci-fi tradition, following a long history of works about AI that predated today\u2019s tech landscape. Philip K. Dick wasn\u2019t writing commentaries about ChatGPT in the 1960s, but it\u2019s inevitable that his work might be interpreted through that lens today. The same goes for The Talos Principle, especially since Reawakened <\/em>revived the first game\u2019s AI optimism in the middle of a heated moment. I asked Jonas Kyratzes if it bugs him that The Talos Principle 3<\/em> could be interpreted as a modern commentary on generative AI.<\/p>\n \u201cI actually think that the issue is that people have been annoying me with that since the first game,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n For Jonas, The Talos Principle isn\u2019t interested in figuring out how the tech could or should work, but rather using it to ask questions about humanity. He\u2019s 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\u2019s tangible discussions, the tech we\u2019re interacting with today isn\u2019t the AI he\u2019s talking about.<\/p>\n \u201cWe 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,\u201d he said. \u201cThat 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.\u201d<\/p>\n There are still places where The Talos Principle 3<\/em> intersects with generative AI debates, though indirectly. Jonas said that, like The Talos Principle 2<\/em>, the third installment is about \u201cimagining a better world and imagining better applications of technology.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe see the lives that these beings live. And a theme that recurs in the game is that they live relatively ordinary lives,\u201d he said. \u201cSome of them go to great extremes \u2014 one of them becomes a planet \u2014 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.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s where Croteam\u2019s optimism comes in. Hunski noted that the series was originally inspired by Star Trek and astronomer Carl Sagan. It\u2019s not cynical, nor does it present its robot civilization as a dystopia. It\u2019s more nuanced than that, and that flows from the compassion that the team has for human beings.<\/p>\n \u201cWe do beautiful things all the time and people are still capable of goodness all of the time \u2026 with the exception of a handful of people who are damaged by this world,\u201d Jonas said. \u201cThat is something that comes up in 3 <\/em>as well. When we see fictional other worlds and their histories, something to consider is: Are individuals to blame for this? Do we go like, \u2018Oh, it’s Elon Musk, it’s Donald Trump, it’s Kier Starmer?\u2019 There’s a kind of compassion in understanding that systems produce these individuals and put them in positions of power. It’s not that this or that person is uniquely evil or uniquely corrupt; it’s that something historical is happening. While that’s very scary, it’s also hopeful, because it means that it’s not the individual people who are to blame. It’s just that we’re all trapped in this machinery.\u201d<\/p>\n Verena Kyratzes recalled a conversation that she had with her father about AI. He said that he didn’t want it to exist because he was sure it would be evil. His reasoning? \u201cBecause the people who program it would be evil.\u201d Verena admitted it was a fair point, but countered with another hypothetical: \u201cBut what if they weren\u2019t?\u201d Call it optimism or naivety, but that question is what powers the series. Croteam refuses to admit defeat, which is why it isn\u2019t backtracking on its philosophy with The Talos Principle 3. <\/em>If anything, the grim state of the world has only given the team more reason to say what it wants to say.<\/p>\n \u201cWe tell this story because we think that a lot of people don’t have hope, because they don’t see the hope,\u201d Verena said. \u201cA lot of the narrative out there \u2014 not just in games, but movies, books, et cetera \u2014 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?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI know that Talos Principle is just one game against this giant flood of dystopian narratives, but we have to start somewhere.\u201d<\/p>\n ![\"A](\"https:\/\/static0.polygonimages.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/talos-principle-reawakened-steam-pc-screenshot.jpg?q=49&fit=crop&w=1300&dpr=2\")
\n <\/picture>Image: Croteam\/Devolver Digital<\/small><\/figure>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/static0.polygonimages.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/talos-principle-3-puzzles.png?q=49&fit=crop&w=1300&dpr=2\")
\n <\/picture>Image: Croteam\/Devolver Digital<\/small><\/figure>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n![\"Palm](\"https:\/\/static0.polygonimages.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/the-talos-principle-3-palm-trees.png?q=49&fit=crop&w=1300&dpr=2\")
\n <\/picture>Image: Croteam\/Devolver Digital<\/small><\/figure>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n![\"D-Topia](\"https:\/\/static0.polygonimages.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/ss_934319930c1f9bd3a6b56e52b87570291ea52483-1920x1080.jpg?q=49&fit=crop&w=220&h=124&dpr=2\"\/)
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