This X-factor of a being insists you take the “sigils” you earn for completing puzzles - these are actually Tetris pieces - and use them to climb the mysterious tower that Elohim forbade you from exploring. You’ll also encounter a series of computer terminals on which you can read about the now-dead humans who created this world, as well as interact with another entity, one which is convinced that God is not so good. As you set out in the body of this AI, a voice in the sky calling itself Elohim will tell you solving these puzzles is His Will. Talos features a posthumanism narrative about an artificial intelligence living in a computer simulation after humanity had been wiped out by a plague - Serious Sam games have stories but, well, they aren’t that. “We had to step away from this mindset, and we had to completely empty our heads and take a fresh approach.” We had a certain mindset in our company,” said Damjan Mravunac, Croteam’s CMO. And so they put the brakes on SS4 and focused on the business of puzzle-making for a while. They were instead building these puzzles for Serious Sam 4, and later decided they warranted their own game. When they began building the puzzles that would eventually make up The Talos Principle, the folks at Croteam weren’t intending to make Talos itself. For the developers at Croatia-based Croteam, Talos is odd because the independent studio has been known for one thing, and only that one thing: the Serious Sam series of frantic first-person shooters.
Aside from PC juggernaut Valve, there aren’t many games in the first-person puzzle game subgenre. The Talos Principle is an oddity of a game, both for the player and the people who made it. This week, we spoke with Damjan Mravunac of Croteam, the Croatian studio behind indie first-person puzzler The Talos Principle.
ANIMAL’s feature Game Plan asks game developers to share a bit about their process and some working images from the creation of a recent game.