The Talos Principle

The Talos Principle hides a conversation about hope and consciousness behind FPS puzzles.

Premise

The Talos Principle is a 2014 first-person puzzle game by a Croatian studio Croteam, known for the Serious Sam series.

You play as an android who has to solve various 3D puzzle chambers. Puzzles generally operate on what I call the "Tower of Hanoi rule", the goal is blocked by a door or an obstacle, and to get through you have to use items to held down pressure buttons or laser receivers, but those items may similarly be blocked, so you just have to juggle what you have until you pass.

In-between puzzles, you can access the computers to read philosophical prose, engage in a debate between two AI, and learn how the world turned out the way it is.

"The Talos Principle is the Straton's famous empirical claim that what it is to be human is reducible to mechanical explanations."

Story

A robot wakes up on a stone slab in the garden, and the voice of Elohim, allegedly God himself, tells it to learn and grow... by solving a series of sequential puzzles. You're FAR from the first one on this journey, along the way, you'll keep finding notes by your predecessor Talos units, their comments about the world and speculations about their purpose. Some of them trust Elohim unconditionally, some are skeptical, some got stuck in a puzzle, and have grown too paranoid to continue and have self-destructed after entering a logic loop. But you must go on.

Puzzles aside, you're also given access to terminals that have some pieces of historical literature, and also voice recordings of Alexandra Drennan and other researchers about the evolution of human culture, such as fall of civilizations, interpretations of the afterlife, info on neural biology and cognition.

But sometimes "the Serpent" talks to you through the terminals, Milton Library Assistant, as he calls himself. Elohim tells you to ignore him. Milton tells you to ignore Elohim. If you engage with Milton, he will keep asking you various trolley problem quizzes, where do you stand between faith and rationalism, sentimentalism and utilitarianism. There are no correct answers, regardless of what you say, Milton will play a contrarian and present counter-points, gaslighting you into thinking you're just a machine who can't argue own beliefs.

Between hub levels, there's also an endlessly tall Tower standing in the middle. Elohim in no uncertain terms tells you that anyone who entered it dies, but if you continue solving puzzles instead, you will eventually be rewarded with ascension and immortality.

There's something odd about the world. Some notes abruptly cut off, and the environment itself appears to be glitching.

It's very easy to tell what's going on. The Garden of Worlds, as it's called, in reality is a Virtual Archive of the Institute for Applied Noematics. You're an AI in training, overseen with other two AI. Countless of generations before you have tried to solve the puzzles, but none have reached whatever the true goal is. How many predecessors? The Archive is now in clear state of decay, with only a small fragments of human knowledge remaining, and it's unlikely it can last for long. Thanks to machine learning, Elohim can always spawn a new AI, but just maybe you will be the success this time.

If you take Elohim's offer, you'll be immortalized as an assistant, providing clues to future generations. But as far as the game is concerned, that's a bad ending. You clearly need to go to the Tower, and in order to get there you need to gain certain key items from the other levels by literally thinking outside the box and getting them out of bounds. Despite Elohim's protest, what awaits you at the Tower is just a gauntlet of more puzzles, the hardest the developers can offer.

As you climb up, what's really going on is explained. In about 2030s, the global warming has destroyed the permafrost and released an ancient virus. As the governments were too busy bickering with each other, the entire population have succumbed to the plague. Giving up on trying to find a cure, the Institute for Applied Noematics has decided to preserve all of human knowledge in one place and create AI agents who would use it to restore civilization. That day's AI models can't do anything, but that's where Elohim and Milton come in. By making Talos units develop abstract thinking and emotions respectively, eventually, just maybe, robots would be good enough to substitute humanity. Alexandra Drennan managed to finish the program literally on her dying breath.

As you get closer to the top, the roles swap. Elohim has grown own sense of self and begs you to go back, as the completion of the goal would result in his deletion. Milton will encourage you to continue and fulfill your true destiny. Once you escape, with you declared the new emergent conciseness, the copy is uploaded into an android unit in the real world, who goes to awaken more variants of itself, and the Garden gets archived forever. A new species comes out from a barely functional hydroelectric power plant, with the purpose of reclaiming the nature and to multiply.

In the DLC, Elohim does one more deed in atonement. He had previously sent some Talos units he found noteworthy into Gehenna, a large prison where they can't move, but can communicate through a message board system. It's fascinating what they came up with on their own while knowing they are just shallow imitations of humans, there is a philosophy thread, a roleplaying thread, an ASCII museum, and even an interactive Choose Your Own Adventure. Elohim tasks the last Talos unit to get them out so they too can be sent to the real world, and you have to individually convince them to abandon the community they've build and that staying there would kill them.

As shown in the sequel, the new race is pretty much complete humans in anything but the bodies.

Final thoughts

If you're a philosophy nerd, this game is pretty clever on that front. Aside from debates about consciousness, you get various pieces from Egyptian, Greek and Roman schools of thought that make you question your place in the universe. Milton will remember your replies and will taunt about them later. If you don't care about philosophy, you can ignore it entirely, the game only progresses when you solve puzzles and you don't even have to do all of them.

As for puzzles themselves, they are quite challenging, but a lot of later ones are rather tedious, you already know the mechanics and have to perform some extreme advance planning and multiple back-and-forth without forgetting what you are doing. Even when you know the entire layout, the amount of possibilities of what connects to where can leave you scribbling with pen and paper for a good hour or two. The hazards are a nightmare, if you screw up and touch an automated landmine, you start the level over, which adds unnecessary stress.

There are a lot of secret puzzles where the game shines the most. For full completion, you have to figure out how to get items through the puzzle chamber's border, which leaves you quite satisfying by cheating the system. There are other secret puzzles like finding a hidden laser connector in the hub environment, utilizing mechanics in two levels at once, or trying to get inside a level from above. They are completely unintuitive, but as long as you know where to look, it greatly breaks the monotony.

The sequel follows the general trend while expanding both core aspects in scope, but how well it did may be a subject for another time.

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