A Save Game, Not an Ending New post Only us
There’s a scene in The Talos Principle that repeats a few dozen times and never makes it into a trailer: you walk up to a beige computer terminal in the middle of some sun-bleached ruin, a cursor blinks, and a library program asks you something no puzzle game has any business asking. What makes a person a person? Can a machine have a soul? Do you always do as you’re told?
And there’s a second scene, one floor up, that no trailer could show if it tried: me, at my desk in Sài Gòn, staring at a monitor that shows a robot staring at a monitor. The question sits on the inner screen for a second, then climbs out through the outer one and into the room.
I could’ve done what games train you to do – read it, nod, walk on to the next laser puzzle and hope some note three worlds later hands over the answer. Instead I held my breath and stepped back (in my head; the robot stayed put) and actually thought about it. Which is why both games took me an embarrassingly long time: I read everything they served, every terminal file, every audio log, every scribble on every wall, and then I kept reading it long after I’d looked away. About ≈50% of The Talos Principle happened on my screen; the other half happened in me, and whenever I came back from a thought break, the game picked up wherever my head had left off. Schrödinger’s game mechanics: the save file exists in two places at once, and only one of them is paused.
Awakening
The first game came out in 2014, built by Croteam – the Croatian studio that had previously given the world Serious Sam, a series whose deepest philosophical question is how many headless kamikazes fit into one corridor (all of them, screaming). Out of that same engine crawled a game about a robot waking up alone in a garden of ruins – Greek columns, Egyptian sand, medieval stone – while a booming voice calling itself Elohim, Hebrew for god, orders it to collect his sigils and never, ever climb the tower. Humanity is gone, wiped out by an ancient virus thawed out of the permafrost by its own global warming; you’re the homework it left behind.
Three voices pull at you the whole way. Elohim wants faith; a dead scientist named Alexandra Drennan talks to you through holographic time capsules, tender and curious and already doomed while she records them. And Milton, a library program living in those beige terminals, wants you to doubt everything – starting with yourself.
The first thing the game slid across the gap between the two screens was the oldest question there is: what actually is life? It sounds like a seminar topic until you’re playing as the test case. If a robot solves puzzles, gets bored, cracks jokes and refuses an order, what exactly is it missing? The usual suspect is the soul, so I went looking for the line between it and me – and the longer I turned the word “artificial” over, the less it held. Everything the engineers in the game used to build a thinking machine, from metal to silicon to electricity to the laws of physics, came out of nature; so did the engineers, by evolution or coincidence or plain physics, take your pick. Nothing unnatural can exist in this universe, which is precisely the problem with the word. “Artificial” doesn’t describe something that isn’t natural; it describes something natural that happened to pass through human hands. A label, and a misleading one (could be wrong here, but I haven’t found the hole yet).
The game takes its name from Talos, the bronze giant of Greek myth with a single vein of ichor running through him: pull the nail at his ankle and he bleeds out like a man. A mind needs something to run on – a body, a brain, a neural network, a bronze giant with plumbing issues, no matter (haha) what shape. The soul is the one candidate that escapes our dimension entirely, so it can be neither proven nor refuted, and anything that can’t be tested isn’t worth a fistfight. That leaves matter as the only real difference between me and the robot; and matter, as it turns out, is negotiable.
Then the game drags in René Descartes, who thought, and therefore was. Fine – but what if I only think that I think I am? A German beat me to that doubt by a couple of centuries: Georg Christoph Lichtenberg grumbled that Descartes should’ve said “it thinks”, the way we say “it rains”, instead of smuggling an “I” in behind the verb. And if an AI thinks it is, does that mean it is? That question stopped being hypothetical for me a while ago; agents write all of my code these days, and the game doesn’t stay inside the game anymore.
And then there’s Milton, whose entire job is to take every answer you build and kick it over. On my first run I fell for him: at the end, he offers to come along into the real world as your devil’s advocate, and I said yes, because who doesn’t want a sparring partner for life? Somebody later dug through the game’s dialogue files for a thesis and found that the designers filed that exact choice under the nihilist path. On my second run I refused him, and pointed out what he is: someone who can’t live without answers and can’t hold a single one. He melted down, right there in his beige terminal. There’s no winning against Milton, because he isn’t interested in changing his mind – the closest you get is making him stop playing. A Reddit user put it better than any critic: love him as a character, would absolutely hate him as a person. The archive in that game even holds pages of William Blake, who accused the other Milton, the poet, of writing the devil better than the angels – some things don’t change in ≈230 years.
The quietest twist in the first game is why the simulation is a game at all. Drennan explains it in one of her capsules: every human society in history has games, and if you leave a person alone with a knotted rope, they’ll untie it. Games are part of what makes us human. A game designer wrote a dead woman explaining to a robot why she built its world as a game, and a human playing that game hears it – three mirrors deep, and every one of them reflecting the same thing back: you’re doing the human thing right now. It’s also the reason the whole series feels like a spa day for the brain. The sun bakes the ruins, Mravunac’s music hums somewhere under the wind, a connector locks into its socket with that soft, satisfying clunk, and every puzzle is fair and has an answer, which almost nothing else in my life does; and every big question comes with a menu of pre-written replies, so I get to try on positions I’d never hold for real without paying the existential bill.
At the top of the tower, Elohim makes the best argument for staying in the game that I’ve ever heard a villain make. In this world we have all the answers we need. But out there? It’s the god, in the end, who’s afraid of what’s outside the door.
Expanse
In my year review for 2023, The Talos Principle 2 got exactly one sentence, squeezed in between a pile of survival builders, so consider this the overdue rest of it.
The robots won, more or less. Long after the first game, the descendants of the one that climbed the tower have built themselves a city, New Jerusalem, and capped it at 1,000 citizens – a growth limit born from watching their creators die of overreach. You’re 1k, the thousandth, the one who completes the count. Then a giant hologram of a titan rises over a nearby island, calls itself Prometheus, and tells everyone to seek the flame; and suddenly the first game’s lonely am-I-someone has company, a social media feed and city politics. TP1 was one mind waking up in a garden. TP2 asks what a thousand minds owe each other, the planet they live on, and the species that built them and then died.
That second one cuts close. I was born German – by pure lottery, inside lines somebody once drew on a map – which means the question of inherited responsibility has followed me around my whole life, and TP2’s robots inherited a planet their creators had left in ruins. So: how far am I responsible for things that happened long before I existed, just because of where I was born? Where I landed is this: there’s no nature AND humans, only humans as part of nature. Plants, animals, fungi, viruses, weather, oceans, rocks, the pull of the sun and the galaxy behind it – we’re still learning how tightly all of it is woven together, and there’s no “they” anywhere in that weave – only us. Nations created historical responsibilities that land on a subset of humanity first, sure; but those responsibilities stay universal, and the logic is simple: a subset might cause something, but only if the whole lets it happen.
The past was once a present and a future too, shaped by ancestors with their own idea of responsibility, which makes us indirectly responsible for it even though we can’t change a second of it. The universe itself only knows the now and its ongoing calculation; we get to look at the completed calculations behind us and sneak a peek at the ones coming up. And our contemporary civilization is terrible at owning either end. Seven of nine planetary boundaries already breached, and the robots’ history lesson starts looking like our to-do list: the game describes our planet from an imagined future, and I play it, uncomfortably, from the real present of the planet it describes.
Then there are the side branches, the conversations you only find if you go looking. New Jerusalem’s citizens pick their roles: female, male, or simply a being next to another being. They choose sexual identities, and body attributes within limits, and they build relationships, binary and non-binary, out of the blueprints of a species that went extinct. So what if we could do that? What if gender were as simple to choose as the right T-shirt in the morning? My guess: people would experiment like crazy – female on Monday, male by Wednesday, non-binary over the weekend, and then something nobody has a name for yet – and most of them would still settle at some point, because stability simply feels better than chaos. Most, not all. Me, I’d want the whole wardrobe. I’d love to step out of my physical limits and live in the female world for a while, with all its wonders and all its injustices, and finally understand what it means to be a woman right now instead of guessing; and then to be simply non-binary in between, physically and metaphysically, and to try every shape a relationship can take, drama included, because drama is one of the things that proves you’re alive.
But the robot city’s real lesson is bigger than my wish list. If bodies and roles were freely programmable, the inequality hanging off them would lose its anchor – because eye shape, skin color, weight, height and gender roles were never the injustice; the concepts we built on top of them were. Concepts can change. Change just takes time and comes bundled with fear, and that’s the difference: TP2’s society has all the time in the world and leans rational, while we get a few decades each and are terrified. Some things aren’t as simple as black and white, or male and female.
TP2 has its own sermon for all this, a text telling you there are no gods, no titans, no heroes and no judges, only you and the spark of your mind – in a game where a literal titan rises over an island, and later turns out to have been a projection all along, a grieving robot’s hope wearing a giant’s body. Somewhere else in that city hides a text warning you never to mistake a philosopher’s beautiful phrasing for his logic, because a pretty sentence is oratory, not truth. I’d been underlining pretty sentences for two whole games by then: message received, mostly.
None of it stayed on the screen. It followed me to the gym, into the pool, into the middle of binge-watching sessions, into bed, onto the commute and – sorry, boss – into work.
Anomaly
In May 2026, Croteam and Devolver announced The Talos Principle 3, the final chapter, coming in 2027 to PC and PlayStation 5. It’s set in the Anomaly, the one place in the universe where the laws of physics stop behaving, and you wake up there with fragmented memories, reliving your life as an explorer. Some say the Anomaly is heaven, some say it’s hell, and judgment awaits either way. The writing team is the same one, now joined by Verena Kyratzes; Damjan Mravunac is back on music, and the press text promises a distant human future that’s post-scarcity, but never post-human. Humans, in a Talos game, with a future – I have questions.
The staircase is hard to miss: the first game asked who I am, the second asked who we are, and the third, set where physics itself breaks, will ask what any of this is. I’ve had a head start on that one since the second game. If TP1 was a simulation you break out of, what if New Jerusalem itself sits inside an even bigger simulation, one that lets you bend physical law? What’s real, and what defines reality? Personally, I doubt we’re living in a matrix – unless you count the universe itself as one massive, irreducible, ongoing computation whose result nobody knows, because calculating the universe would take a second universe. Which, metaphorically speaking, is a matrix after all. Huh.
So my reality is real. Okay, wait: my reality is subjective, but the environment I live in is real, and so is The Talos Principle, and so is the simulated world inside it – simulated in its lore, real from my chair. And the questions it asks are real, too, built by beings that nature made, following physical laws, carried out of a real virtual world into my very subjective corner of a very real universe.
Somewhere around here I noticed something I hadn’t seen coming at all: every answer I’d landed on dissolves a binary. Artificial or natural – only natural. Humans or nature – only us. Their nation’s guilt or mine – still us. Male or female – concepts, and concepts move. Real or simulated – both, depending on which chair you’re sitting in. And for two games, Talos had been handing me binaries at every turn: obey or defy, Elohim or Milton, Prometheus or the voices warning against him. Maybe the binary was the puzzle all along. Now the third game is marketed with another one, heaven or hell, and I already know which door I’ll be looking for: the third.
The Talos Principle 3 reveal trailer
Somewhere in the Anomaly, a robot will wake up with fragmented memories and walk toward a screen. Somewhere in Sài Gòn, a man will sit down in front of a screen and watch it walk. The game speaks to me as part of its mechanics, and I answer outside of them; I am the avatar, and the avatar is I.
A save game, not an ending. Only us.
