The Turing Test review

Available on PC (version tested) and Xbox One

Imitation isn’t understanding; so goes the fatal criticism of Alan Turing’s famous thought experiment. Machines may one day be able to imitate conversational speech, possibly so well as to convince a person they are speaking to another human, but what would this really prove? A machine can parse, but parsing isn’t comprehension. The experiment is flawed, and it’s a great irony that Bulkhead Interactive’s 3D puzzler, The Turing Test, suffers similar issues of imitation. The structural pillars of a fantastic logic game are present, but it unnervingly feels like the game has been reading from a puzzle building manual without understanding what makes dimensional conundrums so fun.

Naturally, the elephant in the room is the comparison that you’re going to hear often throughout this review: Portal. Every puzzle game to follow Valve’s physics-based gaming oddity has born it’s leaden weight. If I were to create my own game with dimensional logic challenges, I would fear its looming shadow and attempt, as far as possible, to avoid shrinking beneath its legacy.

Against all better sense, The Turing Test does the exact opposite. Some of the similarities are so unavoidably direct they flash neon, begging you to make the comparison room by room, challenge by challenge. Players find themselves in a testing facility, watched over by an AI with ambiguous intentions, surrounded by white panelled walls and rooms which must be steadily reconfigured to progress. The Turing Test has arrived at the Oscars draped in the same dress as Angelina Jolie; there is simply no way to avoid the inevitable tabloid photo feature that asks ‘who wore it better?’

On that question, there can be no doubt as to the answer: it’s Portal. But The Turing Test still brings a wealth of well thought-out conundrums to the table, and in spite of its flaws, is worth the time of anyone seeking to challenge their logical prowess.

Players overcome The Turing Test’s challenges via the use of an Energy Ball Extractor Thingy – the technical term was only mentioned once. It looks like a gun but can suck up and spit out balls of energy from a distance which can be inserted into various power outlets. Most challenges within The Turing Test are variations on this mechanic. Rooms are filled with doors that must be opened, platforms that must be moved, and a whole other stack of interactable objects which must be manipulated to progress.

 Each room, for the most part, requires a careful manipulation of these, whilst thinking about space and one’s own positioning, in order to be solved. Said orbs can only be picked up when in direct line of sight, which allows for challenges which span entire caverns.

My first hour or so was spent, rather gleefully, mastering the game’s systems and wrapping my mind around its logic. The difficulty quickly soars upwards, and for the most part, The Turing Test increments this carefully, slowly adding new variables to the mix and creating more complex puzzles. Some are devilishly hard, but there are those of us who always thought that Portal pulled its punches slightly, and this is welcome. The problem facing The Turing Test isn’t that its puzzles aren’t complex, or that they aren’t for the most part fun, it’s that something is missing.

The game lacks any sense of physicality. Where portal encourages throwing oneself, and myriad objects at high speed, The Turing Test is mostly concerned with opening doors and raising of platforms. There’s a great rush the first few times this happens, but once you’ve reached the sixtieth room and you’re still trying to bypass doors using blobs of energy, the novelty wears off.

Portal 2 had to work exceedingly hard to keep players interested in each challenge, even going so far as to introduce insane liquid mechanics which sent you soaring into the air. The Turing Test also attempts to mix things up around half way through, but the result is nowhere near as exhilarating.

The game also experiences an issue with the visual abstraction of its logical problems. Interactable items are connected by cables which indicate ‘this powers that’ or ‘this will make that move’, and working out how each piece of equipment in a room is connected requires following wires from place to place. Many of the game’s rooms are divided into separate segments, and sometimes the cables are exceedingly long which makes it hard, in the more complex rooms, to initially identify what’s going on. It’s like trying to identify the specific configuration of a circuit board if you were stood on top of it and were only 1cm tall.