I don't often give negative reviews for games, mostly because there is an important distinction between "I don't like this game" and "this game is bad".
I won't say this game is [i]bad[/i], but it's definitely [b]not[/b] what it claims to be, which is a puzzle game.
The game starts off with an intro sequence of a man (you) being abducted by aliens. You can overhear (and for no explainable reason, understand) two (presumable) aliens talking about you; the gist of it seems to be that this is supposed to be some sort of test to prove that humans are intelligent. (Never mind the fact that the abductee was driving a motor vehicle on a paved road, which would be an impressive feat if our species lacked the problem-solving abilities they seem to be testing for.)
None of the rules of the puzzles are explained explicitly, except through hints that can be gleaned from the aforementioned overheard conversations between the two aliens. I don't see this as a problem -- in fact, it can be a hallmark of an excellent puzzle game; consider Myst, The Witness, and The Talos Principle -- all three dump you into their respective worlds without any explanation of what to do next, and it's on you to figure it out.
Additionally, for some reason, the aliens have transplanted your brain/mind into some sort of robot body which is capable of doing things that human beings can't normally do. Several of the tutorial puzzles are meant to teach the player about these capabilities.
Several of the early puzzles in .T.E.S.T. are even actual puzzles (most of the earliest puzzles are simply tutorials to demonstrate game mechanics), but the game soon gives way to things that I absolutely do not consider to be "puzzles", any more than the questions in my high school physics homework were "puzzles".
I will elaborate on three particular puzzles that I feel demonstrate the "non-puzzle" nature of most of this game.
[h1]Pool[/h1]
(as in [i]billiards[/i], not [i]a place to swim[/i])
You are given two balls, and to clear the level, one must transport the red ball from one end of a bridge to the other. This would be straightforward, except you have to do this [i]without picking up the red ball[/i]; if you try to do so, you fail. You also can't move the red ball with your feet; you pass right through it. (But somehow you can stand on top of it. That mechanic isn't useful here.) The answer to this puzzle is that you must pick up the blue ball and throw it at the red ball to push it forward.
However, you can't just push the red ball directly down the bridge. There are a bunch of barriers on the bridge, forcing you to move it in a zig-zag pattern. And if you throw the blue ball too hard and it pushes the red ball off of the bridge, you fail. (Also, if you don't catch the blue ball before it bounces and goes off of the bridge, you fail.)
Failure here doesn't require restarting the whole thing; you can rewind to just before you made the throw and try it again. And again. And again. But again, this isn't solving a puzzle any more than calculating the force required to move an object was back in physics class. At least in physics, I knew the masses of the objects and the coefficients of friction and how to deliver the exact force required; here I have none of that, and no reasonable means to find out.
I gave up on this one and went to do some other puzzles.
[h1]Intersection[/h1]
The "puzzle" aspect of this challenge is similar to that of "Pool". I need to get a red ball around a 90 degree turn.
The solution to the puzzle is to the red ball exactly halfway down a corridor, so it lands in an intersection where I can hit it with a blue ball thrown down a crossing corridor, so I can pick up the red ball at the far end.
If I don't throw the red ball hard enough, it doesn't land in the intersection and I have to try again. If I throw the red ball too hard, it doesn't land in the intersection and I have to try again. If I don't have the red ball land in a sweet spot of the intersection, then when I hit it with the blue ball, it won't go far enough and I won't be able to reach it and then I have to go all the way back to my throw of the red ball.
Again: at least in high school physics, they gave me all the numbers -- mass, distance, coefficient of friction -- needed to compute how to make this happen.
This one I actually solved.
[h1]I forget the name of this one[h1]
This is one of the "tutorial" puzzles, intended to teach the player about the "slow time" function (the V key). While V is held, the directional movement of all objects, including the player character, is dramatically slowed. What is evidently not slowed is rotational movement, because you can look around (and pick up objects) at full speed.
The goal of this puzzle is to jump over a chasm and pick up three balls floating in the air near the apex of the jump, then carry them to the exit. It took several tries to time things so I had sufficient time to grab all three of them while they were within distance, but even after I had managed to pull that off consistently, I kept falling short of the jump. I still don't know what I did differently that actually let me land on the far side.
[h1]Conclusion[/h1]
There are definitely some puzzles here, but the ones I've seen were extremely simplistic. All of the difficulty I actually encountered was in correctly guessing the correct angle, distance, and thrust force required to execute the solution. The existence of the "rewind" game makes the game's unreasonable demands more bearable, but it doesn't make them reasonable -- or fun.
