The Turing Test (

2016

) ½

It's hardly controversial to praise the merits of Portal [2007] and Portal 2 [2011], the classic First Person puzzle games. Indeed, judging by their critical and commercial reception, they are some of the most beloved entries in the genre, at this point eclipsing perennial classics like Myst [1993]. Still, I wouldn't hold out hope of ever getting a Portal 3, we've been waiting on it and Half Life 3 (and even Half Life 2: Part 3) for so long that Valve's inability to count to 3 has become a meme. I would caution my readers against despair though because this desperate longing for a new Portal game can lead to all sorts of strange behaviors like making a glorified sequel of your own. Sadly it's too late for that advice, as Bulkhead Interactive has already made one!

How close is the resemblance to Portal [2007]? While during my play-through my wife looked at the screen over my shoulder and asked if I was replaying Portal [2007]. That said, The Turing Test only resembles Portal on the surface level, sure you may be solving a series of puzzles in a sanitized laboratory-like environment while an AI constantly babbles in your head. However, you'll soon discover that The Turing Test has replaced all of Portal's wit and humor with pretentious musings on freshman-level philosophical dilemmas.

There's also, for obvious reasons, no portal gun. The Turing Test is after all a knock-off, not a shameless knock-off so it doesn't dare steal Portal's most notable feature. So, the puzzles take a more mundane form than the ones in Portal [2007] with pressure plates, pull and plug batteries and various switches and leavers being the main mechanics. The one unique-ish mechanic is an energy gun that allows the player to pull charges from mechanisms at a distance, meaning in practice that you'll spend a lot of time using a charge to open a door and then find a window to get your charge back. Still, I shouldn't be too dismissive there are some cool mechanics here and there, like the malfunctioning energy balls that can power devices but only in fits and starts. One especially memorable puzzle had me carefully arranging different types of these to cause a very specific sequence of events in a Rube-Goldberg-esque puzzle.

The Turing Test takes place in the not-too-distant future during a manned mission to Europa the icy moon of Saturn. You play the character of Ava Turing (Christ what a name, you might as well call her Computer McProcessor) an astronaut on the mission who has been abruptly awakened from her cryogenic slumber by the mission AI: TOM (Technical Operations Machine). He's lost contact with the team on the surface, what's more, they seem to be actively trying to avoid him as they have constructed a series of 70 Turing Test puzzle rooms that cannot be solved by an AI. Though I find it hard to believe that TOM couldn't have managed at least a couple of these challenges on his own; the first few rooms amount to little more than placing a heavy object on a pressure plate to open a door!

Now, I've played Portal [2007] and seen 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) before, so I was concerned about my synthetic companion from the start. However, the game doesn't waste much time in giving you ample reason to suspect that TOM has a sinister agenda which he's not sharing with Ava. It's not long that we discover that the crew on Europa have been implanted with chips that allow TOM to remotely monitor, influence, and possibly even control them. It stands to reason that Ava has a chip like that herself, and TOM is only calling her in because he's well and truly lost control of the ground team.

As I mentioned above the intellectual content of The Turing Test is a bit remedial, but you might find it interesting if the names Dennett, Turing, and Searle are totally unfamiliar. The questions about the limits of artificial intelligence and responsible use of the power it presents as an augment to good old-fashion flesh and blood computing are interesting if somewhat unoriginal. Where this starts to break down is the introduction of alien bacteria that make human beings (along with every other living organism they bond with) immortal. When the game sees that its ethical dilemma is a bit thin it just stacks a second, mostly unrelated ethical dilemma on top of it. It's like somebody gave you a trolley problem and then mentioned that one of the five people tied to the trolley is a woman who's pregnant with the next Hitler.

Still, you might find the intellectual core of The Turing Test to be at least mildly stimulating. The real problem with The Turing Test is simple: The puzzles are way too easy. I'm usually quite hopeless at puzzle games, to the point where Baba is You [2019] gives me recurring nightmares, but with The Turing Test, I breezed through the entire game. I never even needed to look up the solution to a single puzzle! A damning indictment of any puzzle game once you take into account what a mid-wit I am. Indeed, the first few levels of the game are so easy they'd be downright boring if you didn't have the mystery of the plot to push you forward. It helps that each chapter has an optional puzzle that provides a much more significant challenge than any of the regular levels. Each one has an interesting gimmick, like the room where you have to knock a battery down a long flight of stairs and haul ass to get in position before it triggers a pressure plate on the bottom. Sadly, these treats were few and far between, and before I knew it I'd cracked the hard optional levels and gone back to the monotony of the main story.

The puzzles only start to get interesting in the sixth of the game's seven chapters, and only really become meaty challenges in the final sequence. It's a downright shame too, as the game's final puzzle before the end is an absolute banger that kept me stumped for nearly half an hour as I worked through it. I wanted more challenges like this from The Turing Test, and unfortunately, the game ended right when it was starting to get good.

Some of this is, no doubt, due to my profession, as a good deal of these puzzles seems to be rooted in concepts that will be familiar to any code monkey. Hell, one of the optional puzzle challenges has the player using logic gates, a concept I have used almost every working day of my adult life! Still, a quick perusal of the user reviews shows I'm not just some big-brained genius, instead it looks like just about everyone, from the drooling retards to the MENSA members agrees that The Turing Test is way too easy.

I suspect that this is due to the Turing Test taking its emulation of Portal [2007] a step too far. The first few puzzles in Portal [2007] were also a breeze to clear, but in that case, the game was giving the player a chance to acclimate to the strangeness of portal technology (to start thinking with Portals as it were). Here we're just turning a variety of machines on and off, there's no alien concept that we need to gradually adjust to. The formula obviously needed to be tweaked to account for this change, but unfortunately, The Turing Test failed to take this into account and as a result, we have a puzzle game that is too easy for most of its playtime.