The Turing Test (Xbox One)

The Turing Test is a first person puzzle game, released in 2016. The closest game to this for me is Portal, they are quite different too. Let's see how it compares to Portal.

You play as Ava, sent to excavate a small moon orbiting Jupiter, called Europa. Along with a research team who have already been sent out, Ava is the last on their shuttle and is finally awaken. She is women by the technical operations machine (T.O.M) an artificial intelligence that tells Ava her crew mates are in danger, this leads to Ava going through a number of tests as she sets out to help her research team.

As Ava is making her way through the tests, she speaks to a member of the research team, informing her she is not in control of her own body, and in fact Tom is controlling her. Not only that, but the crew as found a microorganism that could possibly make humans immortal, meaning their will no longer be any death.  Will TOM allow them to get it back to Earth? TOM expresses the dangers of what could happen if it gets back to Earth.

The tests are designed in a very similar way to Portal, in the way you do one puzzle in one room to open the door and progress to the next. They work differently though, as you have no portal gun, rather a a tool that collects power balls to help open doors. As well as the power balls, there are power boxes too. The puzzles increase in difficulty and even different coloured power balls emerge to get you thinking more. You can even solve puzzles with the help from pressure pads, cameras and mechanical robots.

The length of the game is what you make of it really, obviously if you struggle with the puzzles it'll take a while. The puzzles weren't too challenging, but they weren't simple either, a few required some trial and error, and others you really need to think about.

The loading times were far too long for a game with not much to it. It looked beautiful though, it was well designed and if you explored in between the puzzles, you could find lots of interesting information about your crew mates. The music was really fitting too and I enjoyed the expositing between Ava and Tom, who were well acted also.

It went in the games with gold program around a year after its release, which doesn't sound good, to give a game free so soon, but it's much stronger than you'd think. I actually bought it about two months before it went free.... Worth it though.

7.5/10