The Turing Test

4 September 2016

👍 Recommended (5.4 hrs on record)

The Turing Test is a first-person puzzle game much like Portal and The Talos Principle, with many of the same elements. Fans of those games should investigate this.

The game engine being used is Unreal Engine 4. The game looks gorgeous and the gameplay feels great. The story is conveyed through dialogue with TOM and audio logs; very few cutscenes. Given the omnipresent cameras on Fortuna and Europa I would've enjoyed more video logs of the characters to let them come to life.

The story revolves around Artificial Intelligence and the nature of consciousness, with a heavy emphasis on ethics. I love both of these themes, but the story unfortunately doesn't really dive deeply into either one. From a veritable treasure trove of material available the game picks just commonly repeated highlights. The most interesting material is hidden away in optional siderooms.

Having just played The Witness as a contrast, the puzzles in this game felt extremely simple. I expected the difficulty to pick up after the first few chapters but it never truly did and I did not get stuck once. I guess that's somewhat to be expected when the game is strictly linear and can't afford to let the players fail, but I was somewhat unsatisfied nonetheless. The hardest (optional) puzzle amounts to basic operations of boolean logic. I would have loved to see this idea followed just a little bit further into logic gates for instance.

All in all, the game is a good effort and was fun to play through, but misses some of its potential. A qualified recommendation for fans of the genre.

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