The Turing Test

An excellent game visually, mechanically and with it’s strong story and acting, this should be in your libraries.

The Turing Test really proves the player's abilities and make us swim into a deep pool of reflections and ideas about the human mind.

Whether you’re in it for the gameplay or find yourself drawn in by the looming mystery that steadily simmers over in due course, The Turing Test (minus the occasionally hard-to-decipher audio) is a smartly-structured and delicately-arranged puzzle game that knows its boundaries and leaves it to the player to fill in the missing gaps.

The Turing Test offers some engaging puzzle gameplay that will keep you entertained for roughly 12 hours. It lacks polish in some areas but as a package is a solid addition to the library of those interested in first person puzzle games.

I don’t want to disparage The Turing Test too much. It suffers by nature of comparisons with other similar games, but perhaps unfairly. With its lightweight puzzles and plot, The Turing Test is one of those “Great-For-An-Afternoon” games, the ones that scratch a specific itch and go down easy. In this case, it’s the “I need something like Portal, but I’ve already played Portal” itch.

The Turing Test is a nice puzzle/adventure game that revolves around unoriginal puzzles and a very interesting narrative. The whole experience can feel a little drab unless the player both really enjoys this kind of “portal-esque” gameplay and loves a good sci-fi story.

There's promise in The Turing Test's constituent parts, but considered as a whole, it fails the imitation game. [Nov 2016, p.110]

Love a game that challenges you enough without taxing you too much, nice story, good computer/character interaction. The game offers a taste of history if you have the patience to read the docs you find. I give it a 9 out of 10. Bringing Alan Turing and Ada Lovelace together is the perfect computer history story!

The Turing Test is a puzzle game strongly inspired by the Portal series. Each level consists basically of a series of test chambers, where at the end of each one you get some clues about the plot. The story is good, but it won’t surprise those who are into science fiction works. Although the plot is more down-to-earth and makes sense, the existence of so many test chambers doesn’t (if you ignore this fact, your experience won’t be harmed). The graphics still stand out in 2025 (though there are a few details that are a bit outdated). The soundtrack is good, but melancholic. The mandatory puzzles are clever without being impossible (but for those who played Portal, they might find them a bit less creative), while the optional puzzles are more challenging (some even deviate from the game’s established patterns, which could leave you confused and frustrated). There's very little variety in the environments, which makes the experience a bit dull over time. The AI guiding you through the plot is somewhat monotone, but raises philosophical and intriguing questions. Overall, I enjoyed the experience and would recommend it to fans of the genre.

Another one of those "portal-esque" puzzle games. You talk with someone, solve puzzles, and there's a little bit of story. The puzzles are decently well designed and it is overall entertaining enough. A decent game to kill a few hours, though I would pick up at a discount with a runtime of only about 4-5 hours.

The Turing Test is yet another first person puzzle game where the player is stuck in a strange environment with a possibly malevolent “mission control” (yet another AI, this time), solving a series of puzzles to try and navigate through an environment. In this case, you are controlling a woman called Ava Turing, who is being commanded by TOM, the AI of the mission, to go down to the surface, reacquire communications with the crew (which is rebelling against him), and to eventually help him to stop the crew from escaping Europa with an organism they found there which potentially threatens life on Earth. The core story here is actually fairly decent – the premise of the tests being set up to prove you are human (as they are designed to keep out TOM, the AI, but not Ava, the human), as TOM is not programmed to be creative (in fact, he is specifically programmed not to be, making him inflexible and rigid – exactly what the mission needs in its AI). As you go through the tests, TOM and Ava talk about the Turing Test, the Chinese Room, and various other ideas about free will and whether or not AIs are really “intelligent”. TOM himself seems to argue both sides when convenient; he claims he is nothing more than a calculator, but clearly has feelings and emotions and gets angry when treated like nothing more than a machine. There’s a twist about halfway through the story; I had thought it was going to be either that the whole thing was a simulation (i.e. none of it was real, it was all a test of the AI to determine how it would respond to a situation like this) or that it was going to just repeat the Bioshock plot twist straight up. Instead it went for something a bit new, which I liked, as while I’ve thought about that particular twist before, I’ve never seen a game actually do it. Sadly, while the twist ultimately unlocks the last gameplay element, the gameplay element of looking through cameras and controlling robots and triggering switches through them is something that Watch Dogs did several years ago. And given that the other puzzle mechanics of the game are standing on switches, putting heavy things on switches, and grabbing and manipulating balls of light from a distance to put into power slots to power things… it ain’t exactly the most innovative game ever. Indeed, the actual puzzle gameplay is just not very good. The rooms are thankfully very short, each relying on a particular bit of lateral thinking, and are mostly quite simple puzzles, with only a few really being all that long. This is mostly a good thing, but it ultimately makes the game feel a bit shallow – I never got any great sense of achievement or reward for solving the puzzles, and most of them were very easy. There were 77 puzzles in all in the game, and overall it took me about 6 hours to 100% it. And I have to say, even on top of that, I wasn’t overly fond of the characters, either. TOM at least has some personality, but Ava is pretty bland, and by the end of it, I never really identified a single major character trait from her. The other characters – who you get to hear the audio logs of – are not particularly interesting either, with only the captain feeling like he has more than one note to his personality. And even TOM doesn’t always feel like he is written all that consistently – he argues with the crew about how he is really a person, and argues with Ava about how he isn’t. While him being two-faced and untrustworthy is a big part of the plot, it would have been nice for him to more directly acknowledge his own hypocrisy – instead, not even the characters arguing with him do so. The result was that this game didn’t really touch me. It had a couple interesting ideas in its story and playing with its medium as a game, but as a game, it felt dull, uninspired, and unoriginal, without any memorable gameplay or setpieces. While it tries to be philosophical, it is nowhere near the level of something like The Talos Principle, and while the sterile testing environment (and some of the elements, like the switches and light bridges) are reminiscent of Portal, it is lacking in the character of those games as well. Ultimately the game as a whole just ends up being rather flat. It never really did anything particularly interesting with itself, the story isn’t good enough to be worth playing through the game for, and the characters aren’t memorable. Is it terrible? No. But it doesn’t excel in any way. You’ve got better things to do with your time and money than play this game.

I'm sorry but this game pissed me off. It's a poor version of The Talos Principle. Only less creative. All the game is about big empty spaces with door puzzles to solve it. I was thinking big Europa Station to be explored, a lot of rooms, a lot of secrets but all I got was door puzzles. It's not a "smart" game like many critics are saying. Believe me. It's one of those that really pisses you off at the end. Oh I forgot to mention: BUGs. Lots and lots of bugs. You better prepared yourself for loooooong loading times. But do a little research and there's a lot of help on the internet.