The Talos Principle 3, the third and final chapter of one of the least-expected videogame series of all time, was made official today, and much like the jump from the first game to the second, it promises a familiar slate of puzzles wrapped in a very different sort of narrative experience.
The teaser doesn’t reveal much about what’s in store for the third game, except that this is a conclusion, of sorts: “Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Birth, life, death,” the narrator intones. “But we are not stories.”
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That’s some serious Talos Principle teasing, alright, and as a fan of the series, it hits. That opening shot of the boundless cosmos seems pretty meaningful too, and I should probably point out that if you haven’t played the previous Talos Principle games and want to enjoy them without spoilers, now would be a good time to go read something else.
A hiddenish Talos Principle 2 ending reveals the existence of an anomaly, billions of light years from Earth, whose existence defies the otherwise complete and infallible “theory of everything” discovered by Athena. The cutscene for that conclusion includes an image of distant stars identical to the one seen in today’s teaser. It’s no great surprise, then, that we’re going to be learning more about that in Talos Principle 3.
From today’s announcement: “As if awakening from a troubled sleep, you find yourself in a strange, contradictory world of crumbling temples and abandoned science outposts: the Anomaly, the only place in the universe where the laws of physics don’t work as they should. Your memories are fragmented, but you know you came here for a reason.”
Big stuff, clearly, and it will lead players across more than 12 worlds in an exploration of “the remains of the world that humanity once built,” which sounds kind of ominous depending on which version of humanity we’re talking about—but, as with the first two games, The Talos Principle 3 will tell its tale of a foundational moment in human history “as lived through a person’s life.”
“It’s about your life, the character that you play. And so you will see many different places based on that,” lead writer Jonas Kyratzes told me in a recent interview. “It’s a historical moment seen through the eyes of a person. So it’s the rebirth of humanity in the first game, and then it’s this turning point in their history in the second one, but lived through the life of 1K and his friends. And this is about what came after that, lived again through the life, seen through the life of a character. And with the anomaly—the exploration of the anomaly is a significant part of that.
“So it does have a kind of a wide scope, and in some ways—while remaining still focused on this character and characters around them, these stories are all character driven—but together, they form this bigger picture of humanity, from its kind of resurrection to the distant future.”
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Experience with the first two games isn’t necessary to play and enjoy Talos Principle 3, but writer Verena Kyratzes said it will definitely land with more impact if you’re familiar with them, comparing it to her own experience with Star Trek. “The shows exist independently of each other,” she said. “But I watched TNG before I’d seen the original series, and there was the episode where Scotty showed up, and I was like, ‘Who is that?’ So yeah, you will always get a little bit more if you played the previous games.”
I can attest to this: The opening of Talos Principle 2 is laden with callbacks to the original, none more powerful than the voice of Elohim welcoming you to his garden—a moment that just won’t carry the same kind of weight if it’s your first time hearing it. And yes, Elohim will be back for The Talos Principle 3.
“It was very important to us emotionally, because the fact that he’s there, that after that ending there is still hope for him—that what he was afraid of, which was a world without purpose, is still something where he can thrive,” Jonas told me. “And the fact that you then see in the DLC Isle of the blessed, you see an Elohim who was kind of born from the algorithm, and you get the idea there’s probably going to be more of him, even just existing in the in the outside world, that’s incredibly significant to us.
“He is a thread through all of these games, and he has a significant part to play in this game too, and that was kind of like, it had to be there.”
A release date for The Talos Principle 3 wasn’t announced but it’s “coming soon,” and is up for wishlisting now on Steam.
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