Video Game Review: The Turing Test

[Dave Gray]

This is currently free on XBOX One, if you have an XBOX Live Gold membership.  It goes through November 15th.  Once you download it, you own it forever.

Premise:
Awoken from hypersleep on a space station on Europa to find the rest of the crew missing, an astronaut works with the station AI to solve logic puzzles that keep you from your colleagues.

This is a pretty blatant rip-off of Portal, yet it manages to carve a niche for itself, because of its tone.  Whereas Portal breaks to be more silly, satirical and funny, The Turing Test earnestly explores what AI is, what defines humanity and sentience, and how morality plays into the difference between the two.  It's a darker tone, for sure and is reminiscent of an AI/human relationship seen in movies like 2001 and Moon.

The gameplay is fairly straightforward at first.  You have a magnetic gun that sucks up and shoots out power orbs.  You take one from this door and replace it to another to open it.  Simple enough.  Then, they introduce multiple colors of orbs that do different things.  Then, there are lifts, magnets, ramps, etc.  The game does a very good job of not overwhelming you, however.  Each chapter is broken into 10 small levels.  These levels take anywhere from 30 seconds to about 15 minutes (assuming you don't just get completely stuck), depending on how quickly you figure out the flow of the room.  And the game uses the first few levels of each chapter to introduce new ideas.  The game teaches you by playing and allows for discovery rather than through tutorial, which is something I really appreciate.  The later few levels in a chapter usually combine what you've learned in the prior with things that are more complex.

There are 7 chapters and if I had to estimate, I'd say I burned through all of them in about 6 hours of play.  I never fully had to cheat and look up a solution to a level.  Once or twice, I really had to think outside the box to solve a puzzle (which is good) and once or twice, my difficulty came from the game's lack of informing me what I could do (like I didn't know I had capability to run or that I could hold more than one orb at once).  I would've preferred that there was a timed "hint" system if you were missing a basic functionality component, rather than being stumped by concept.  However, that is very, very minor.  There were also one or two occasions where I ended up beating a puzzle, maybe through luck by just trying the right thing first, where things just sorta worked out for me, but I didn't fully understand why.  Lastly, to the game's credit, you don't necessarily need an "a-ha" moment to solve a puzzle.  You can make progress through the puzzle and tell that you've gotten through the first hurdle.  In other words, you aren't completely stumped until you've solved a puzzle.  You can solve it in pieces.  There is also no fail-state and not many cases where you find that you've un-did something that worked for you.

If you're interested, there are also a handful (one per chapter) of challenge rooms where the puzzles really make you think outside of the box, are particularly involved, or require finding supplemental info or knowledge outside the game to solve.  These are optional.  I was able to beat all of these as well.

For a free game, I had a great time and the game really made me think about some of the deeper themes.  It is absolutely a no-holds-barred ripoff of Portal, but I found that more familiar than off-putting.  The length is just right to have you finish the game before you tire of its concepts.

And it's free.  Go get it.