The Turing Test

True Achievements puts on a playlist every month where they have a featured game that everyone plays. I haven’t taken part in one of these before but I did in November as The Turing Test was the nominated game and it was being given away for free as part of Games with Gold. Instead of accumulating further unplayed games, I thought I would try and get another one off of the list.

The Turing Test follows the story of Ava Turing as she wakes up in a research facility on Europa (A moon of Jupiter I believe?). She is going in search of her crew with AI, TOM accompanying her. The story line follows Ava’s interactions with TOM as they discuss AI and the value of the life from the perspective of a human versus a machine. There are no hilarious consequences here, but I did find the dialogue exchanges interesting for the most part.

The gameplay itself sees you using an equivalent of the portal gun to move energy around to try and get through a series of rooms. There are seven chapters each with ten levels of gently increasing difficulty that you must traverse in order to try and get to the rest of your crew. You are introduced to different mechanics as you travel through the levels so the game evolves as you progress. It is also very Portal­-esque in this approach.

I was also very proud of myself for completing this one as I only had to use a video guide for the very last puzzle of the story. Such is my mind that I think the puzzles must have been easier than what I’m used to, or I’ve become more puzzle-gaming clever in my old age? Who knows. At certain points I thought that maybe I wasn’t solving them in the way the game intended them to be solved... but that’s just more points for me for ingenuity.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 15 Achievements

In terms of achievements, there isn’t much else to add. 8 of them are obtained from completing the game. There are seven secret areas, one per chapter, that need t be solved for the 100%. These are in the same place in all chapters though so you don’t need to do much searching for them.

Again with the optional puzzles, I was able to solve most of them without the assistance of video guides with the exception of two but one of these was really stupid. The first one was in chapter 2 where you have to walk slowly across a light bridge. There wasn’t really any clues I could see that pointed towards this being the way to do it and compared to some of the other puzzles, this one was a little outside the box.

The other one was in chapter six and this annoyed me a little bit. You have to solve various light orb puzzles to unlock gates to get to the end of a long corridor. At the end of this corridor is another gate that appeared to be locked and I couldn’t see a puzzle I needed to solve to open it. I watched a video where the guy doing the puzzle just walked through the door without doing anything! He also thought it was locked and when I tried again it let me though. No idea why this was the case, but this was the hardest room to solve to get 100%.

Downloadable Content – N/A

The Turing Test took me around 7 hours to complete without the use of guides. With a walkthrough it can probably be done in less than three so it’s a completionist’s dream as well as a pretty solid puzzle game with decent story element to boot.