Hidden Gems — The Turing Test
The Turing Test is a first-person puzzle game developed by Bulkhead Interactive back in 2016. It follows the main character named Ava, an engineer and vehicle officer working for the International Space Agency, as she searches for her colleagues inside an ISA facility on Jupiter’s moon Europa. The whole premise around her and her team being there is the potential for them finding life on Europa, but the game quickly evolves around this idea and the moral consequences of discovering something this impactful to the human race.
As you enter and move through the facility, you discover that the crew has made Turing Tests of sorts, puzzles that are meant to only be able to be solved by a human and not a machine. Thus the station’s AI, T.O.M., requires your help to reach the colleagues you’ve been cut off from. As you talk with him through the game you begin to gain this sort of bond with the AI, a friendship of sorts, as you both share the common interest of finding out what’s going on aboard this station.
It’s this bond that helps to drive the player to continue through the continuous labyrinths to come to the conclusion. Seeing the relationship between a woman and an AI evolve and change based on the game’s events is quite interesting to see, and later on in the game becomes quite an interesting moral conundrum thanks to a large reveal down the line. I won’t go into what that exact event is, but it definitely does change the way you’ve viewed the story up to that point. Part of which may seem obvious at first, but will hit you unexpectedly in a way that is quite satisfying.
Speaking of the levels though, I need to express that a lot of the game’s levels often felt very basic and for those who are being introduced to the PC puzzle genre. This would normally be okay if the game ramped up the difficulty at a steady level to become harder and more challenging as time went on. I even found a few of the puzzles during the last of the game to take me less than a minute to complete which really surprised me but in a bad way.
Thankfully though, that is the only real gripe I have with this game, as it manages to not only deliver on but also exceeds expectations greatly on other fronts. The game’s visuals are stunning for the majority of the game and while they’re few and far between, many of the visuals manage to really give us a side of Europa that we wouldn’t normally see from the surface. It helps to flesh out the environment you’re in and makes it feel more like a living breathing world than a barren snow planet. Even the test chambers, which mostly consisted of black and white, still managed to look stunning in the chosen art style. I was blown away and even spent some time just looking at the beauty of the game while looking at certain locations.
Overall, I would recommend The Turing Test to those who love not only a fun puzzle game to kill some time, but an interesting story that they can sink their teeth into and end up thinking about even after the game’s story has concluded. You can pick up the Turing Test for $19.99 on Steam, or during the Humble Spring Sale for $4.99 until May 23rd.
