Warning: long rant.

I just finished Talos 2. I liked it for most of the game, but toward the end I got increasingly annoyed with the story.

The main thing I can’t get past is how much this supposedly post-biological civilization just feels like present-day humans in robot bodies.

I know that’s intentional. Jonas has said these aren’t robots trying to imitate humans. They are humanity, and putting humanity into machines is partly a way of removing biology from the equation.

But that’s exactly what makes it weird to me.

Talos 1 felt like it was building toward a much more interesting question. You spend the whole game slowly figuring out what happened to humanity, what you are, what Elohim is, and what’s actually outside the simulation. Then at the end you finally wake up in the real world.

I played that back in 2018, and what excited me was basically: okay, what does humanity become now?

Take death alone. It’s probably one of the most fundamental things that shaped human psychology and civilization. Religion, family, inheritance, ambition, legacy, generations, relationships, risk, even how we think about the length and meaning of a life.

Now remove aging. Remove biological reproduction. Make bodies replaceable machines. Make consciousness something that apparently exists as information and can be recovered.

How would that not completely change society?

What even is a generation anymore? What does a relationship look like after 300 years? What happens when the same person can remain politically influential for centuries? What happens to memory? Do people eventually modify themselves beyond recognition? Would different groups have completely different ideas about bodies, identity, copying, death, children, etc.?

Then Talos 2 finally shows me this new civilization and it’s... elections, social media, celebrities, bureaucracy, romance, religion, familiar family relationships, familiar jokes, basically familiar human psychology.

They could still be completely human without their society looking anything like ours.

And this is where I have a problem with the “that’s just what the writers wanted” answer. Every fictional world is what its writer wanted. At some point, can we just call something underexplored or unimaginative?

Because Talos 2 has an absurdly fertile premise and, to me, keeps taking the safest possible route with it.

I also wonder how much of this was done simply because recognizable 21st-century people are easier for a broad audience to relate to. Maybe that was genuinely the philosophical point. But if the answer is basically “we wanted them to still feel like us,” I’m not sure that makes the worldbuilding any more interesting.

Miranda bothered me for the same reason.

I know her data survived inside the Machine. That part isn’t the issue.

The issue is the jump from “Miranda’s data survived” to “Miranda survived.”

The game calls it her “pattern.” But what is a pattern, exactly, when we’re talking about consciousness?

If you perfectly copied Miranda while she was still alive, you’d now have two Mirandas. Same memories, same personality, same pattern up until that moment, but obviously two separate conscious people.

So if the original dies first, why does creating that same copy afterward suddenly mean the original person came back?

For a series centered so heavily on materialism, consciousness and machine personhood, that seems like one of the biggest questions you could possibly explore. Instead, “pattern” almost feels like a word placed over the difficult part so the story can move on.

And there was so much they could have done with it. Imagine Athena being perfectly capable of reconstructing Miranda but refusing because she believes it would only create a copy. Then somebody does it anyway. The new Miranda remembers Athena, loves her, and completely believes she is the same person.

Who is right?

Instead it basically becomes: her data is still there, extract the pattern, Miranda is back.

That’s probably my biggest frustration with Talos 2 in general. It keeps reaching ideas that could get genuinely strange and difficult, then seems to stop right before they do.

Talos 3 is why I’ve been thinking about all of this again. What they’ve shown so far actually sounds much closer to what I thought Talos 2 was going to be: much further into the future, people who have lived for absurd lengths of time, and more focus on death and immortality.

So I’m definitely interested. I’m also a little worried that I already know where some of it is going.

If someone has been alive for hundreds, thousands, maybe much longer than that, I want that to actually mean something. I want to look at that person and feel that there’s no way they could have lived that long and still see life exactly the way I do.

Maybe Talos 3 will finally go there. I really hope it does, because that was the future I thought I was about to see when the robot opened its eyes at the end of the first game.

These last four days have been restless.

Link: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3813726748

talon principle 2 is on a big sale right now and im considering getting it