The Talos Principle II Interview: New Mechanics, More Characters, & Harder Puzzles

Developers behind The Talos Principle II discuss the new puzzling mechanics, characters, and philosophical concepts introduced in the sequel.

The Talos Principle II expands on the concepts presented in the original in expansive ways, introducing innovative puzzle mechanics alongside a bigger narrative. The game is made by Croteam, the developer behind the Serious Sam series, and will be released by indie darling publisher Devolver Digital. Almost ten years after the release of the original, The Talos Principle II aims to bring the mind-bending puzzle franchise to new heights.

Set in the same universe as the original, The Talos Principle II takes place in a world where humanity has been replaced by robots, and the player is the 1000th that has just been made. After being invited to a mysterious puzzle-filled island by the technological entity Prometheus, players can freely roam as they solve the many puzzles scattered throughout the world. There are both entirely new puzzle mechanics and ones that expand on ideas from the first entry - for example the RBG converter, which is similar to tripod laser connector players are familiar with. Each puzzle cluster has eight main puzzles, two Lost Puzzles, and one extra-challenging Gold Puzzle.

Related: The Talos Principle II Has "A Lot More" Characters, Says Developer

Screen Rant sat down with puzzle designer Mario Kotlar and writer Verena Kyratzes at Gamescom to learn more about The Talos Principle II, its puzzling tools, and the philosophical concepts it will explore.

Screen Rant: I would love to just hear a little bit about the new sort of puzzling mechanics that players will get to experience.

Verena Kyratzes: So the Talos Principle I was a story of how humanity accidentally wiped themselves out through global warming, they released the virus from the permafrost, they wiped themselves out. And the scientists in the dying days of humanity decided to try and create a successor species to the human race: robots. And the question was, "Can I create a robot that is, in terms of its intellect and its emotions, a human being, despite not having a biological body?" And the answer that the first step reached was yes, we can. Now we're 1000 years later, if you've seen the first Talos Principle, this will look very familiar to you. It was very important for us to do a story that's not just you know, The Talos Principle II: Harder. "Are you really sure that you're a human being?" Yes, I am - we've been over this.

So we wanted to take the story of Talos I and then do the logical next step. So after we talked about the individual, we are now talking about society, about civilization. We wanted to tell a story about the real world now, not again something that turns out to be just a simulation. You now learn that your name is 1k, you are the 1000th robot that was created 1000 years after the program of the first Talos Principle was finished and roughly 2000 years after humanity wiped themselves out. The number 1000 is very important for the robots, because they have decided that the thing that they're most afraid of is to repeat the mistakes that the biological humans made. They are afraid of technological expansion, accidentally damaging the environment in a way that they cannot foresee and that they cannot undo. So they have decided that they will build a city - a single city with 1000 citizens and you are the 1000th - and then they will be done. Like civilization will continue, but it will not expand past this point.

And that is a very hotly discussed topic within the city, because while this is the government plan, there are some people who think 1000 robots is pretty bold, like we should have stopped at 100. And others think there were 8 billion humans, so why don't we build 8 billion robots? And, of course, all shades of meaning in between.

This is the mayor, one of the many voiced characters of this game. The first Talos Principle had two characters - this has a lot more. So there's a big party to celebrate your birthday and the culmination of the goal, but it is interrupted by Prometheus, an entity created by a technology that the robots cannot fathom. This is science fiction to them, like, "What the hell is going on there?" And he says, "I come from a mysterious island, full of wonders and mysteries and puzzles, and I invite you, robot kind in general, and your the player character specifically to come to this island and solve its mystery, solve its puzzles, and also receive answers - what kind of answers he doesn't entirely say.

This is a game about societies, so if we're asking the player to care about society and to make decisions about society, we have to give them the option to also learn about the society; you cannot care about something that you do not know. So for the players who really, really want to just go like, “This is a puzzle game, give me the puzzles," they can take the optimal route through the city. And so we found an organic way to integrate backstory into the game. But you don't - I want to make this very clear, you do not have to have played Talos Principle one to understand Talos Principle two, we've been very careful to make it so that you can get an additional layer of meaning maybe sometimes, but you don't need to understand it.

And so the biggest question is, I said in the first game, you were inside the simulation, and you were solving puzzles to prove that you're a human being. Now in the second game, we're in the real world and somebody built puzzles out of steel and concrete that are clearly related somehow to the puzzles of the first game. So the big question is, who did this? Who created this echo of the infancy of human of robot civilization and why are they asking you to solve puzzles? I'm not going to tell you now but that's one of the questions that the game is going to answer.

Mario Kotlar: You might remember the tripod connector from the first game where you could connect source and the receiver with the laser, and then the door will open. There is new mechanic called the RGB converter, and for this one, you need an additional color of the laser, and the output is the third quarter. Our goal in the puzzle is to reach this progress wheel, put our hand on it. This system, this is the milestone system, it will show us which way we can find go find which puzzles, so telling us to go back if you want to solve the first puzzle, telling us the second puzzle is solved, and to the left are puzzles, three, four, and this gates represents the golden puzzle, while these triangles represent last puzzles.

So there is more than just those eight puzzles. But for now, we'll go and solve puzzles, or we can just go and explore because there are things to find, for example, the Prometheus Spark as we call it, a digital flame for you where we can actually use that to skip puzzles. So this is puzzle number three, let's see if we want to skip it, maybe it's too hard or something we want to skip it for now. So if we find one of these, we can pick it up, they persist through levels. Most of them are a little bit more hidden than this one, but they're not very hard to find. But this spark that I used, it hasn't been destroyed, it actually has been trapped inside. I can still come back and solve the puzzle and I'm going to get my spark back as a reward. So it's kind of turned mandatory content into optional content right there to give players more freedom and more choice of how they want to approach the game.

So on this map - on every map, really - if you go around, you can explore and you can find other more interesting things other than just puzzles, like all the logs and terminals, which were also available in the first game. So now they're back, you can use them in regards to story to find interesting things. The gold puzzle in the distance, that puzzle is very difficult and it's locked for now. Players can unlock them later and there's one per level; by solving all of them players can unlock additional endings and such. And they can also unlock additional endings.

Each new map introduces a new mechanic or a new concept. This point uses teleporters, I cannot teleport through a closed door, but I can teleport through a fence. And another new mechanic, it's interesting the interplay between them; it's a driller, and it makes holes in the walls. The hole itself is too small for the players to actually pass, but the teleporter can because teleporter is an item, and items can pass through the hole. So we just placed on the other side. And that's how we can combine new mechanics in interesting ways to solve puzzles. Another really cool new mechanic, it's called mind transplant, and it's also relevant to the story.

Verena Kyratzes: Earlier I said that there's 1000 robots, and it took them 1000 years to make them, so it's very difficult to make new robots, and also resource scarcity is a big problem for them. Suddenly they enter a puzzle and bam, there's an empty robot; like it doesn't have a mind, but it's a body. So clearly, whoever built this has the ability to just snap their fingers and make a robot. And of course for a society that is currently at this moment of decision, whether we want to expand further, if we want to stay small - this is obviously a game changer.

So the characters that are with you are going to be discussing this and all the other technologies that you can find on the island quite explicitly and quite in depth. This replaces a mechanic from the first game which was called the recorder - which was not very well loved - where you had to record a video of yourself essentially and then solve the puzzle with yourself in tandem. And this is multiplayer with yourself, so if you make a mistake, you don't have to wait for the entire video to play out until you can try again. You can very easily just go back one step and retry, so it's a lot less frustrating and hopefully a lot more fun.

Mario Kotlar: And there's one more thing that is different in Talos II compared to Talos. One is that the difficulty curve where the difficulty in Talos I went just a little bit up and down, but it would trend upwards and then at the end of the game, you would have a difficult puzzle after difficult puzzle. Mentally tiring, right? And people would pause and maybe not continue with the game later on.

So we really wanted to make the game more approachable and more fun in that way to address that problem. But we didn't want to make the game easier in order to achieve that, because we felt the game was right where it needs to be; the difficulty in the first one was pretty good. And so in order to achieve that, we pushed some of the harder puzzles earlier into the game. And after each map is finished, we would reset the difficulty down as the new mechanic is getting introduced, so it's like a solid pattern that goes up and down up and down with each level.

Of course, there is still a slight upward trend to just compensate for players naturally getting better at the game while they're playing it. And the thing is that now that we have put difficult puzzles so early in the game, like puzzle seven in Talos II is going to be much harder than puzzle seven was in Talos I. So to compensate for that, that's where those new Prometheus Sparks come into play.

I know on the website for the game you could find lines from The Tempest. Is there anything you can tell me about that?

Verena Kyratzes: So the Tempest, yes. As I said, this entire thing takes place on the mysterious island. So there are very strong parallels to The Tempest, like we're borrowing quite a bit from old William. And The Tempest has all these themes about magic and about Prospero giving up his magic. And so there are quite a lot of parallels. There's the character of a lost daughter, which we haven't touched at all upon in this presentation - I hope that I'm not spoiling too much when I say this. We're not obviously making a remake of The Tempest but there are quite a few parallels and we borrow a little bit from Shakespeare so it's no accident that those quotes are in there.

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Source: Devolver Digital/YouTube

The Talos Principle II is planned for release some time in 2023 for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC