The Turing Test

At first I found it a bit clunky using mouse and keyboard but once I switched to controller I had a lot more fun. Its a really good and enjoyable puzzle game that feels substantial but not too repetitive. Highly entertaining!

[h1]It's not [i]THAT[/i] challenging[/h1] This one is an oddball of a game. On the one hand you have the gameplay - a series of puzzle rooms for you to solve and get through. But in my mind the puzzle rooms take a back seat to the philosophical arguments presented herein. The game takes its name from the real world. The Turing Test of 1950 (so named from the famous individual, Alan Turing) is a form of imitation game, testing a machine's ability to behave like a human being. In the game, the argument takes on a more immediate physical problem that is hard to explain properly without resorting to spoilers. At its core, you are woken from deep sleep and are sent down to Europa (one of Jupiter's moons) in order to find out or rescue the rest of your team that has gone missing. Assisting you is TOM, a facility computer supposedly helping you. Playing as Ava, as you progress through the puzzle rooms you gradually get more and more dialogue with TOM, culminating in a final scene in the epilogue where you get to choose one of two endings. The endings themselves I felt were disappointing - the game tell you you've passed the Turing Test either way and credits roll without any further information. For a game to tackle such a huge philosophical argument as the Turing Test, I straight away thought two endings just wasn't enough. Having said that, the issue the argument applies to is so enormous that I couldn't see any other alternatives. ______________________________________ The puzzles were a bit simple, it's true. It seems like the game has tried to get up there with such greats as Portal or Talos Principle, but didn't quite get there. I think I might have got stuck only once - and that was during Optional 6, with the huge number of orbs and the symbols that correspond to Boolean commands. Room 7's trick had me stumped for a while, but after looking up the answer I felt that it was a bit cheap. At its heart, it is a first-person puzzle game, where you mostly pick up either cubes with your hands (E) or energy balls with your gun with mouse clicks. This is all the gun can do, but it can store up to 3 energy balls. The energy balls come in various flavours - blue is the standard, but there is also green, pink, orange. Figuring out how they work is part of the fun. Other features include giant ceiling magnets for picking up cubes or small robots, switches for changing power flow direction, switches for sliding machinery on rails. There are still more elements than what I've mentioned here, but still... I think the reason why everything is so easy is that so much of everything is based on switch-type choices. Even if you don't know what you are doing, just trying this OR that on everything will get you there. ______________________________________ Despite how easy it is, I still felt it was a great experience. I found myself really looking forward to the philosophy of the dialogue. Documents and audio recordings add more food for thought, and trying to imagine what Earth would be like if the survivors got back is truly the stuff of nightmares. Good visuals, average musical ambience, but great voice acting. Try it for yourself.

7/10

Fun puzzle game :)

There are better first person puzzles out there. The story is bland, the gameplay is sluggish, the ending choice makes pretty little sense if you think the risks over for at least a second.

A solid puzzle game in the "Portal but with our own special puzzle mechanic" category, e.g., like Q.U.B.E. and Lightmatter. Pleasantly, the narrative exploration has its own surprises, with a believable interaction between human and machine.

Similar to Portal, Talos Principle.... not as challenging.