Game Pass It Up: The Turing Test
The Turing Test was released in 2016 and was developed by Bulkhead Interactive. It is a first person puzzle that takes place in a colony on Jupiter’s moon Europa. The crew has disappeared and in their place is a series of puzzles that Ava and the colony’s AI, TOM, must solve.
The game starts off with Ava being woken from cryogenic sleep on a satellite orbiting Europa. From there you take a lander down to the colony and begin to unravel the mystery of the missing crew. The story unfolds in a similar fashion to Valve’s 2007 hit Portal. Ava and TOM have few bits of dialogue at the start of each puzzle, but the bulk of the world building comes from findable audio tracks scattered throughout the colony. It is in those small clips where the story hooks you. By the end of the game you are invested in the crew’s struggle for humanity on a planet far from Earth.
The Turing Test attempts to organically teach you the systems of the game through level design. The end result is sort of a mixed bag. There are times where the game completely succeeds at this, which genuinely feels good. Other times the game arbitrarily changes established rules or has less than elegant puzzle design. One example is an optional puzzle based on basic logic gates. The puzzle starts off fantastic and teaches the player as they solve the puzzle. However, near the end of the same puzzle the game arbitrarily changes rules around how a door is unlocked, and did so in a way that wasn’t immediately obvious. That was simultaneously the best and worst puzzle in the game. The game was just about the right length for this kind of game, clocking in around 4-5 hours. It never wore out its welcome and it never felt stale.
The Turing Test is a reasonably good looking game despite the environments being very samey. While the game looks fine artistically, the game doesn’t run all that great on the Xbox One X. There was a lot of stuttering going on, and there was also a fair amount of animation jank whenever you interact with game objects like ladders. The game’s audio did a good job of adding a creepy vibe to the colony, but often the mix on some of the optional audio tracks were uneven, making hard to understand without subtitles on.
Game Pass is perfect for a game like this; A short puzzle game that is interesting, but not something I was completely sure I wanted to drop money on. The story was interesting and the game was enjoyable. Not every puzzle is a winner and the framerate did stutter a lot, but overall it is worth a play.