The game industry is built on long-running franchises, but Devolver says it doesn't want that for its narrative-focused puzzle game. The Talos Principle 3 is coming, and I'm very excited: What initially attracted my attention as a sideshow curiosity from the Serious Sam guys quickly proved itself a clever puzzle game powered by an unexpectedly compelling and thoughtful narrative. I like it a lot! And so it's kind of a bummer that Croteam insists, with absolute certainty, that the third will be the last. It's unusual in the world of videogames (or movies, or television, or any other popular media built for consumption) to say "no more," but writer Jonas Kyratzes told me during a recent chat that Croteam doesn't think of Talos Principle as "a franchise that will go on and on and on." Instead, the studio had a broad concept of how it wanted to tell the story across three games, and now, "This is the end. This is the last Talos Principle." "We might do some small spinoff one day or something like that, but the story of Talos Principle ends with three," Kyratzes said. "So many videogames just don't end, and then you have an endless kind of cliffhanger or whatever, and there's no satisfying conclusion to the story. And then at some point the company closes, and this story is never completed. And with Talos Principle, that's not what we want to do. We want to tell the story and then be done with it ... Really, the idea is to have a complete work—the way that we look at it is that this is one thing. It's one story in three parts. And when it's done, I think that will also kind of be visible. That was the kind of the intent." Game director Davor Hunski said that if Talos Principle 3 is on par with the first two games in the series—and I don't think there's any expectation it won't be, but you never want to be overconfident about these things—it will make The Talos Principle "one of the best" videogame trilogies, and more broadly, "really, really special in gaming," even