The Turing Test (2016)

I'm a big fan of realistic sci-fi. I in particular love the theories about Europa. I was a massive fan of the Europa Report movie. So the premise of this game is absolutely fantastic. Taking place on the planet Europa you wake up in orbit and than are quickly shuttled down onto the planet.

There are so many issues with this game though that really take away from the story element and immersion. It is a puzzle game at heart but to stand out from the games its clearly inspired by it should have leaned better into the setting.

Issue one is that it feels like a very early prototype of a VR game but VR doesn't exist for it. If you've never done VR before they typically allow you to pick up all kinds of objects to both test handling them and seeing the physics. Or seeing interesting fluid mechanics. This game just has so much random garbage you can pick up and none of it means anything.

Not a single item has any secret code or hidden puzzle element. Probably roughly 200 items you can pick up and rotate and spin but none of them do anything.

Theres no alternative paths or any bonuses for finding the secrets. The ending gives you a small amount of freedom but it almost feels like it doesn't matter because you get zero closure on your choice you make at the ending. It just instantly jumps to credits. There could have been so much more done for the ending. It had such a good build up of implicaitons to your final choice.

This is a game that really could have benefited from a bit more dialogue and a little bit more meaning to your actions. Theres a part where you can turn on a drill that doesn't seem to affect things in any way shape or form.

The puzzles were decent. Not fantastic but none of them overstayed their welcome. What you do get is interesting enough as a game. It's not that long so it's an enjoyable short ride. But it could have been so much more.

If you enjoy the portal games this has a similar vibe to it, though lacking the sassy dialogue from the AI overlord. Overall I can really appreciate it, but I feel neutral towards it and I wouldn't particularly recommend it to someone unless they adore spacial puzzles.

It's an interesting concept. You are awakened by an AI to figure out what is going on with the crew at a station. It has lost contact with them and needs a human to get through to where they might be because the rooms are designed with the Turing Test in mind. These are tests an AI would not be able to complete because it lacks the human creativity needed. As you go through you start to unravel the mystery of what happened. There were some neat audio files and messages to read, and at the beginning of each room, there is a dialogue between you and the AI, both about the plot and about the nature of machine versus human thoughts. The pacing was good and at about the halfway point, there were some interesting reveals. Underlying themes of morality and what it is to be human versus machine are always interesting. Ultimately I think it piqued my curiosity enough to keep me interested until the end but I wish it could have been delved into more. That being said, this is primarily a puzzle game so there is only so much space for this. I did enjoy the ending though I have questions... and overall I am a sucker for sci-fi.

The gameplay was fine. I enjoyed the puzzles and got stuck on some of them. I think they were cleverly designed and required you to think outside the box. At some point the gameplay changes by adding an extra plot-related element, which was sudden but I enjoyed it because it spiced things up. At intervals, there would be areas of pure exploration where you can pick up and look at items in the environment. You can read messages and listen to audio files, which for story purposes are extremely interesting. Other than that 90% of interactive objects were a waste of time because there was no information there, though perhaps the point was to make you feel empathetic towards the crew.

I enjoyed that some puzzles had a side room where, once that puzzle was solved, you could enter a room that provided more story details. That was a cool feature.

The graphics, music, and atmosphere were all alright! nothing blew me away, but it was solid and a pleasant experience.

Not sure who this would appeal to, but it was very inexpensive on sale, so maybe it is something you will want to try!

Like the game. Liked the premise. Manages to get through most puzzles without cheating and liked the mechanics it tends to introduce (and the out of the box curve ball it will sneak in every now and then) mixed feelings on the story. Would have been ok to kept the story a bit simpler.

Worthwhile if you like stuff like this

Sci-Fi is one of my favorite genres. I am always fascinated by the imaginative alien worlds, future technology and idealized solutions to current day problems. If there is one subgenre that I feel is tricky to get right, it is the subject of Artificial Intelligence. The main problem is that AI has been a topic in countless films and video games and it is easy to stumble upon the familiar plot of an AI gone rampant. The Turing Test, unfortunately, while narratively creative, is not an exemplar of the genre. The game is also extremely similar to a certain popular Valve franchise.

The Turing Test begins with an AI named T.O.M (Technical Operations Machine) who wakes up the astronaut Ava Turing, from cryosleep. They have received an emergency distress call from their base in Europa (the moon that orbits Jupiter). The AI informs Ava that a deadly organism has broken into the base and that Ava must get in contact with the other astronauts to find a way to stop it. When Ava eventually reaches the base, she is immediately faced with a difficult situation. All of the doors are locked, the base configuration has changed and the only way to progress forward is to solve a series of puzzles. For some extremely contrived reason, T.O.M informs Ava that these puzzles were developed to ensure that only a human can solve them because AIs lack the creativity and ingenuity to do so. The game literally plays like its namesake: The Turing Test, a procedure to tell whether a machine can be as intelligent as a human.

If you have played any first person puzzle platformer in recent memory, The Turing Test will feel instantly familiar. The hook of the game is that Ava is armed with an energy gun that can absorb and shoot charged balls of energy to open/close various doors, lifts and machines. There are also energy cubes that Ava can pick up which also powers these devices. Lastly, she can also operate cranes and lifts to navigate through each puzzle room. After a series of puzzles, there is often an optional secret puzzle room that is more challenging to solve. There are also puzzle-free lore rooms that help flesh out the plot, where you can listen to audio logs and read notes from Ava’s fellow astronauts.

I have major issues with The Turing Test, but strangely admire its effort. The game is clearly developed on a shoestring budget. The menu UI is basic and looks unfinished. The graphics are buggy like how Ava doesn’t have a reflection but her gun does. Subtitles don’t play for all spoken dialogue. The puzzle rooms are very samey rectangular white environments. The puzzles are not evenly paced with widely varying difficulties. And the game tells more than it shows, especially how T.O.M loves to explain the Turing Test and Chinese room experiments to Ava. Yet the game manages to punch above its weight somehow. The graphics are impressive and the voice acting especially for T.O.M by James Faulkner are superb. The music is also excellent. It manages to nail the feeling of being in a cold, sterile environment without feeling bland which is important in a puzzle game where it is easy to spend long durations listening to the same soundtrack.

The Turing Test is a satisfactory puzzler but the story is both the highlight and lowlight for the game. I was genuinely surprised and pleased by the twist in the game’s climax. The ramifications of the reveal were promising and I was hoping for an exciting final act. Sadly the game never manages to deliver after this point. Various character motivations are left unexplained, concluding with multiple versions of the same ending. Ultimately, The Turing Test tries to be more philosophical and intellectual than it actually is. It tries to evoke the memories and feelings of other better puzzlers. And coincidentally, maybe because of its namesake, it tries to pretend to be a game that it is not.

The Turing test feels a bit like a mix of Portal and Tacoma but fails to match the strengths of either. Both Portal and Tacoma engage with similar ontological themes and tell effective stories through mechanics and exploration/environment respectively. The Turing Test struggles with its storytelling through mechanics and environment and resorts to exposition via voice over, which leads to a very disappointing run through of what can typically be interesting subject matter.

The puzzles are all very easy, with very little in the way of increasing complexity. For the most part the game introduces a new mechanic and then moves to another new mechanic before truly testing you on the previous one. As a result the game feels perpetually stuck in tutorial mode. An even bigger head scratcher for a puzzle game is the fact that half-way through a significant element is introduced that arguably halves the difficult completely. For those looking for a challenge, it’s probably best found elsewhere.

The Turing Test has been done before and in far better ways, which leaves me wondering if it is time worth spent.

On one positive note, I never once felt the need to second guess my solutions. Every solution worked out exactly as I deduced, something I can’t always claim about another popular Portal-like. So praise to Bulkhead Interactive for their consistent and well implemented level and puzzle design.

I can assure you that you've played the Turing Test before.

You remember, right? It's that first person puzzle game where you go from test chamber to test chamber solving puzzles with your special puzzle gun, and an AI talks to you, and you find secrets that hint that things aren't quite as they appear, and there's a mid-game twist involving you and the AI.

I know you've played this before. We all have! Maybe when you last played it it was called Portal, or The Talos Principle, or Q.U.B.E, or THE ENIGMA MACHINE , or any number of other names.

It's a good game! But as with any replay, things will feel very familiar.

Few games have a stronger divorce between story and gameplay as The Turing Test. This blatant Portal clone ports most of the mechanics from the Valve masterpiece but grafts them into a story that is not a match; and the patient almost dies of transplant rejection.

You play as an astronaut (whose name, Ava Turing, is not the most on-the-nose decision of the game) on a scientific mission in Jupiter's moon Europa. You are waken up from suspended animation by an AI called TOM - Technical Operations Machine - who tells you that there has been an problem with the ground team and you must go down from the orbiter to rescue them. Once on the ground, you are presented with a ludicrously enormous base which has been reworked by the ground team into a series of test chambers. TOM assures Ava that this tests are specifically designed to only be solvable by a human since AIs lack the creativity to think outside the box. They are the titular Turing Test. It takes Ava an incredibly long time to understand that this is because they are trying to keep TOM out.

As you progress, you inevitable are confronted with Ominous Revelations (R) about what happened to the ground team and your role in the operation. I won't spoil the story but suffice it so say that there's a lot of talk about intelligence, ethical boundaries and freedom.

As far as gameplay, the puzzles are just fine if not uneven. They are short, self contained and each uses only a small subset of the available mechanics. While they are mostly about opening doors, there are several puzzles that make great use of the environment, or are very complex and force you to stop and plan ahead.

Others are extremely linear and can be solved by following the path of least resistance. Some are also more annoying than challenging. A lot of the time the difficulty stems from arbitrary limitations and the solution is fairly clear from the moment you enter the room, taking more time to perform than to plan.

The exceptions are some extra rooms (literally on the side) that are actually smart and force you to use the tools you are given in a ingenious game. These are few and far between but are genuinely the best part of the game.

But where the game falls apart is in the plot. It really blows my mind that so many reviews praise this game story as some Sci-Fi masterpiece. Is not just that the plot makes no sense and contradicts itself, but also that it actively works against the gameplay.

A clear example of the latter are the conversations between TOM and Ava. They follow the same pacing as Portal: you enter a room, there's a bunch of chatter, and then silence until the next test. This translates into conversations spaced out by several minutes of silence, which makes for horrible dialogue and poor timing. Ava would rebuke TOM for things said 10 minutes before and TOM's ramblings about the Chinese Room experiment are punctuated by long stretches of silent puzzle solving.

As an example of the incoherent story, TOM talks extensively about how his programming doesn't allow for problem solving because it involves creativity (which is complete nonsense as even today we have algorithms that can solve specific problems) and how he is prohibited from using evolutionary algorithms because the results are not constrained by morality (which, again is nonsense because one could optimise for ethical solutions). But in the one occasion in which he suggest a solution for a puzzle, it is both very creative and completely inmoral (and also wouldn't work).

Again, I don't want to spoil anything, but also the Ominous Revelation (R) is completely at odds with the main premise of the game.

For a puzzle game, The Turing Test has one of the dumbest stories I've seen in videogames. The puzzles, however are sufficiently challenging for it to be a fair, short experience.

A first person puzzler, with narrative inspiration from Portal (player woken from stasis, guided by an AI through puzzle rooms). The puzzles focus around moving around energy balls, which open doors or move platforms and whatnot. Puzzle rooms are well laid out for the most part, but just how the game works makes it rather tedious to play. You see, some energy balls are mobile- they can be placed and taken from afar as long as you have line of sight; but some are in boxes, and must be moved by hand. The management of these boxes mean many puzzles come down to progressing halfway through a room with the mobile energy balls, then going back and shifting the boxed ball up. It's the point where you know the solution, but the execution becomes long-winded where puzzle games break down. I didn't came across any big "aha!" moments, either.

The story is presented well, but I won't say much more about it than that. It's worth playing for the presentation of the story, if anything.

The game takes 2.5 hours to complete.

I'm overjoyed to see more of these 3D puzzler game popping up over the last couple years. This one, in particular, has a "space isolation" setting, one of my favourite themes. It looks a bit like The Talos Principle mixed with Routine and a dash of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I hope it offers a good challenge!

It was released today on Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/499520/