The Turing Test

The Turing Test is a 2016 first-person puzzle game that feels like a Portal knock-off in all the right ways. You play as Ava, an astronaut on Europa some 200 years from now, trying to reconnect with the rest of her crew after something goes wrong. When you enter the Europa base, a series of puzzle rooms stands between you and your objective. There are seven chapters with ten regular rooms and a bonus room for 77 total puzzles.

The puzzles consist of using orbs and boxes to provide power to and cut power from various devices - most of them doors - in order to progress through the rooms. Some of these puzzles are extraordinarily simple, and serve mainly to teach you about the mechanics of puzzle solving in this game; the entire first chapter is pretty trivial - lots of "move that box to that slot to proceed" and "learn how to use your orb gun" and things of that nature. Even toward the end of the game, some puzzles will just seem to click. In a lot of ways the game played like The Witness - just with platforming puzzles rather than grid-based mazes.

Throughout it all, you interact with an omnipresent AI system called T.O.M. At the beginning of every room, Ava and T.O.M. exchange some words and ideas, and through this - and some scattered audio logs - we are told what small amount of story there is to tell here. Anyway, some of you may have seen the game's title and immediately thought of the Turing Test. That and many other philosophical musings about artificial intelligence pop up throughout the game, and about two thirds of the way through, the rug gets pulled out from under Ava regarding a certain assumption she'd made about her own relationship with Tom. I was just fine with all of this. Give me two characters bickering and debating philosophy any day while I lug boxes around a room. Tom spends a lot of time trying to convince Ava (and us?) that he's got a real and valid mind of his own; he may not be a human, but he's sentient, dammit!

None of this was amazing, but the puzzles were challenging without ever feeling genuinely unfair - something I can't say for every puzzle in The Witness at all - and the gameplay, despite a few lengthy load times and one or two glitchy-looking textures, was smooth and bug-free. All in all this was a pretty solid puzzle game, and it's absolutely worth grabbing if it ever goes on sale or, better yet, gets offered for free under Games with Gold. It probably took me about five hours to complete, 1000 gamer points and all, and I only needed to look to the Internet for hints three or four times. (And two of those were for bonus rooms.)