The Conscientious Conclusion

“Franchise is McDonald’s, not art,” writer and narrative designer Jonas Kyratzes says when I push him and another The Talos Principle III writer and narrative designer, Verena Kyratzes, on whether this is truly the final game. A narrator in the game’s announcement trailer says, “Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Birth. Life. Death,” and it does not take any hunting to find words like “the last chapter” on the game’s official marketing pages. This is the third Talos Principle game, but Jonas and Verena chuckle as if sharing an inside joke when I refer to it as a franchise. “He hates that word,” Verena says with a laugh.

Jonas, Verena, and the wider Croteam aren’t opposed to sequels without apparent end. Between mainline games and various spin-offs, it has released or helped develop more than 15 Serious Sam games since 2001. But The Talos Principle is not Serious Sam, even though it did, curiously, begin as creative experimentation inside the bombastic shooter before spinning out into its own very, very different thing.

“Around 2012 [Croteam was] supposed to do Serious Sam 4, and they were trying to come up with a new way of gating progress that wasn’t just you find the red key, find the blue key,” Verena, who has written on the Serious Sam games as well, says. “They had so much fun playing around with that, that they started building an entire game based on that, and kind of forgot that it was supposed to be a Serious Sam.” For context, Serious Sam is a game about time travel and shooting an absurd number of evil aliens. The Talos Principle examines the nature of consciousness, artificial intelligence, and what it means to be human against the foreground of complicated but rewarding environmental puzzles.