Watch A Talos Principle Map Get Made In Real-Time

Croteam is working on a new first-person puzzle game called The Talos Principle. It's a game centered around traveling, adventuring and dodging laser-beam-shooting robots.

The Talos Principle hasn't been in the media circles all that much, but it's slowly building its rep toward its late 2014 release. It's an interesting game that managed to gain a bit of ground following its showing at E3.

The newest video for The Talos Principle is actually a user map being made with the design tools. The video above originally took four whole hours to complete that map. That's actually not very long given that for some games back in the day it would take months to complete a map. In this case, they managed to condense down the process of making the map into a 25 minute video on YouTube.

It still amazes me how easy it is to make highly detailed, geometrically dense maps within the span of just a day. It would take me weeks just to map out the geometry for some maps and then several more weeks just to texture it all... but this was back during the old-school days of gaming where you had to use several different tools just to node and view a map's geometry and then back into the editor to fix a missing vertex or a misaligned split.

With today's technology you can literally plot out the geometry of a map, apply textures and see it in action all from a single editor. You really have so much power at your fingertips in today's design field that it's just astounding to behold.

We actually see how the map comes together from start to finish in the video, going from the basic foundation to the props, the cliff-side and the puzzles. If you've ever bothered designing anything in the Unreal Engine Development Kit then you're likely to feel pretty close at home with the map building tools for The Talos Principle, which are based on the same technological foundation that Croteam used to build the newer Serious Sam games.

As for The Talos Principle itself... it's a difficult game to describe. It's certainly not a walking simulator and your wits, reaction times and reflexes will be tested, believe it. The game has some pretty trippy puzzles that require thinking well outside the box at times. There was a video that was more than an hour long, I believe, showcasing different puzzle elements, challenges and the physics of the game.

The final thing will sport more than 120 non-linear puzzles (meaning, a lot of these puzzles will be up for interpretative solving) and feature drone diversions, turret guns, robots and lots, and lots, and lots of philosophical mind-screwing.

Croteam's first-person outing is planned for release on PC and PS4. There's a public test available for the game at that moment. And yes, the game will be 1080p and 60fps on the PS4. You can look to purchase a digital version of the game on December 11th.