There's good news and bad news for players of The Talos Principle who find themselves stuck in non-functioning elevators. The good news is, it's not a bug. The bad news is also that it's not a bug: It's another example of Croteam's creative DRM.

The presence of the copy protection came to light on Twitter when publisher Devolver Digital retweeted an image of a Steam forum post, since deleted, complaining about stuck elevators. The response noted that the problem was actually Croteam's way of punishing people who pirated the game, and predicted, accurately, that the message "will be all over the internet in about 30 minutes."

The original complaint illustrates the problem with this kind of DRM: It's almost impossible to tell at first glance that it's DRM at all, and once it comes to light, it's usually relatively easy to patch around. Potentially worse, games risk earning a reputation as being buggy, rather than imaginatively protected, which can adversely affect sales.

Even so, this isn't the first time Croteam has indulged in this kind of oddball copy protection. A few years ago, Serious Sam 3 pirates famously suffered the wrath of a lightning-fast, immortal scorpion that rendered the game effectively impossible to play.

There was a time when those naughty pirates were dealt with via aggressive pursuance - it's not so much like that these days, as games like the Talos Principle show.

As complained about on the Steam forums, players using an illegally-obtained version of Talos end up stuck in an elevator until they either break down in tears and turn the game off, or... just turn the game off.

With each elevator leading from the main facility into the game's three hub areas, you have to use them to progress - or backtrack. Meaning being unable to use the elevators both stops you from progressing and retreading old ground.

The discussion may have been deleted now, but you can join in the chuckles over on NeoGaf if you're so inclined, as well as seeing a couple of screengrabs.

This isn't Croteam's first foray into trolling the pirates, but it's certainly a good one. If it's as good as Serious Sam's immortal, ever-pursuing scorpion... well, I'll leave that for you to decide.

And while you're deciding, you can legally acquire a copy of the Talos Principle on Steam by exchanging money for the product. Wahey!

The Talos Principle is out today. It's a first-person puzzle game about lasers, computers and doing what you're told. Or not doing what you're told, as the case may be. This trailer offers a few hints as to what's inside.

I've played it for a few hours, and so far have enjoyed placing jammer devices near hovering bomb-bots. Chris, meanwhile, has played it for much longer, and has some more profound and useful thoughts. He's jotted them all down in our review.

The Talos Principle is available on Steam. I'd provide a link, but if you can't work out how to get there, you're probably not ready for the game's puzzles.

I can't tell you with any certainty what it really means to be a person. I can tell you, with a little more authority, what it is like to be a person who arranges blocks, fans and lasers to solve puzzles under the eye of an omnipresent intelligence. You materialise in a maze styled after Greek myth; urged to collect Tetris pieces to assemble keys and unlock new pathways, you solve building-sized puzzles using a set of logical tools that interact with each other in increasingly complex ways. You do so with the encouragement of an unseen voice, identifying itself as god, possibly an AI, and you piece together the truth of the world by reading, paying attention to your surroundings, and unlocking secret areas.

The Talos Principle is unlikely to be the first time you've encountered this structure for a puzzle game. It's Portal, in essence, or Quantum Conundrum. Likewise, a decent number of its game systems arrive from elsewhere: redirectable energy beams courtesy of Portal 2, recording and replaying past actions a la Braid, stackable boxes and pressure plates via a million other places. Novelty is not the game's strength. What makes The Talos Principle valuable is the comprehensive skill with which these pieces are assembled.

The forgivingly low bar set by its initial puzzles belies the complexity of what follows, and the majority of chambers are flat-out excellent: a feat made more impressive by the sheer number of the things. You're looking at a running time of ten to fifteen hours to do absolutely everything, assuming that you don't smack up against the ceiling of your own acuity. The difficulty curve is expertly set. Once you've got your head around how a new tool works, many puzzles can be cracked with less than a minute's consideration. It's the optional set—denoted by a red Tetris piece—that raise the stakes. One or two of these stumped me for half an hour or more, and beating them made me feel like Dr. Smartman, Professor of Being Smart at I'm-The-Best University. That feeling is a substantial part of why these games are appealing, and The Talos Principle delivers.

That's the pure game part. The other half of The Talos Principle is found in its loftier ideas. Considerations about the meaning of personhood, apocalypse, machine intelligence and the ramifications of the Biblical Fall of man are spun through the game via text-dispensing terminals. There is a surprisingly intricate story being told, here, and its substance is only gestured at by that booming voice in the heavens. Its meat is in logs, excerpts, e-mails and interactive conversations that you extract from DOS prompts, records that touch on everything from the day-to-day running of a scientific facility to literature and, particularly, philosophy. It's cleverly written stuff, varied and interesting.

It is, however, an extension of—rather than relief from—The Talos Principle's demand on your brainspace. Other games of this type use narrative to provide a break from the rigours of problem solving. Here, all that written material (and there's a lot of it) is another type of puzzle, less strictly logical than the challenge chambers and more concerned with ideas. The game is a thought experiment, of a kind, and you've got to be willing to engage with some heavygoing backmatter to get the most out of it. It's well worth engaging with, in my view, but I'd forgive you for not wanting to pause to parse twenty lines of computer-corrupted Paradise Lost having just exhausted your faculties rearranging lasers.

I'm fascinated by The Talos Principle's lack of visual artistic direction. This landscape of remixed Greek, Egyptian and medieval styles is technically accomplished but says absolutely nothing: a sense compounded by the fact that the developers let you fiddle with colour filters from the main menu. More than anything else it reminds me of those benchmarking demos that used to ship with 3DFX cards in the late '90s—depopulated ruins presented for their complexity only, any human point of reference secondary to some mechanical process churning away beneath the surface.

In another game I'd write that line off as overthink. Chances are, nine times out of ten, that art that says nothing was trying to say something and failed. I don't think that's true for The Talos Principle. If any game was going to look like a Voodoo 5's fever dream on purpose it'd be the one with a wide-ranging interest in machine-generated worlds, artificial intelligence, and the way that personality imprints itself on nothingness. The game is clever enough to pull something like that off, and generous enough in its puzzle design to make you feel clever into the bargain. If you're actually a person, that is. There's still some doubt on that front.

If you dig the idea of The Talos Principle but don't really have a solid handle on what it's actually all about, the "Public Test" release that hit Steam today might be just what you need. It features four complete puzzle levels of increasing difficulty plus a benchmark tool, and it's completely free.

The idea is to provide stress and compatibility testing prior to the full release of The Talos Principle, but it should also help gamers decide whether or not this is the sort of thing they want to throw their money at. Given the relative vagueness of the premise, after all, this really is a game that's well-served by a demo.

Believe it or not, the artificial intelligence referred to in the trailer is actually a real thing. The game underwent roughly 15,000 hours of playtesting at the virtual hands of a bot, which the studio created and used to check for flaws in level designs that could make them impossible to complete. The bot watches a human complete a level once, then uses the logic of the solution to work through changes in level geometry, obstacles, and placement of puzzle objects.

"The bot replicates the gameplay played by human and uses game mechanics to solve puzzles, just like a human player would. When the bot notices a problem, it automatically reports a bug using our in-game bug reporting system, then uses cheats to move on and continues testing further," Croteam Chief Technology Officer Alen Ladavac told VentureBeat. "Thus, in one 'playthrough,' the bot can report several possibly game-breaking bugs and give us a report of overall health of the game as it is in that moment."

The Talos Principle public test is available now from Steam. The full version The Talos Principle, which will include more than 120 puzzles in total, comes out on December 11.

I'm kind of excited for The Talos Principle. A "metaphysical parable about intelligence and meaning in an inevitably doomed world," developed by the studio responsible for one of the most joyfully meatheaded shooters of all time? That sounds like my kind of good time. And now the game has a proper launch date, and as is now very much the, a nice little pre-order deal.

For as much fun as I have with the idea of Croteam making a thought-provoking puzzle game, I feel obligated to again point out that The Talos Principle is actually being written by Tom Jubert and Jonas Kyratzes, who between them have created games like FTL, The Swapper, and The Sea Will Claim Everything—somewhat more intellectual fare than Serious Sam, in other words.

But even though The Talos Principle may eschew the "No Cover. All Man." ethos, the preorder bonus does not: Laying down your money now will cut ten percent off the purchase price of $40, and will also net you a giftable copy of Serious Sam 3: BFE. It's a really good shooter, and probably the absolute opposite of The Talos Principle in every meaningful way.

And now, as promised, the release date: December 11 is when the brain-scratching times start to roll. More info can be found over at Steam, and in the meantime you can watch about an hour and a half of the game being played—poorly—right here.