Puzzles and sci-fi are two things surprisingly hard to get right in gaming in order to deliver a great and fun experience. Make the puzzles too hard and you risk preventing players progressing and leaving them frustrated or get the sci-fi story wrong and it can end up being a bland and lackluster experience that simply tries to copy what others have done before. Happily I can say that finally a game has managed to get both elements right and in a refreshingly new and impactful way that really impressed me with its delivery and gameplay.
The story puts the player in the role of Ava Turing, an engineer for ISA, the International Space Agency who is awoken from her cryo sleep aboard the a space station orbiting Jupiter by the station’s AI entity T.O.M. to investigate the loss of communication with the ground team based on Jupiter’s moon Europa. Upon reaching the base, T.O.M. explains that the base, built using modular construction, has been altered by the ground crew for an unknown reason. Moving through the base the Ava discovers that the sectors have been arranged into puzzle rooms that will require Ava to navigate and provide power to the only exit door to reach the next room.
Two things stand out immediately when you begin The Turing Test, the story and the puzzle rooms and manage to deliver an experience that provides high quality on both those elements. The puzzle rooms are intricately designed to provide a strong challenge in the later stages but never stray into the frustratingly impossible head scratches that would become off putting to carrying on. Ava is armed with an EMT, a tool capable of collecting energy orbs and transferring it to power nodes or devices required to solve the puzzle layout of each room. Whilst it does seem that the only goal of sourcing power to the exit door is a simple one, the complexity of the puzzle designs offer a rewarding challenge. What I found most satisfying was how the game both teaches the player and eases them into using new puzzle elements before testing how well the player is able to problem solve using the new techniques.
Complimenting the actual gameplay is the story itself and how it is told via dialogue between Ava and T.O.M. as you explore each room. Through this dialogue exchange you begin to learn more about T.O.M. as an AI as he tries to explain his own actions and his inability to solve the puzzle rooms by himself as the designs were deliberate so only a human could solve them. Each of the seven chapters that make up the game features ten puzzle rooms and between each chapter the story unfolds more and more with interactive areas which through interactions add more pieces to the mystery of what happened to the ground crew. Each crew member’s story is expanded with each section as you learn their back-story from their personal effects and from audio logs which tell the events leading up to the moment Ava is woken to investigate.
The little details the player can discover by exploring the interactive areas add so much depth to an already strong sci-fi story and combines the gameplay to deliver a truly satisfying gaming experience. The musical score sits in the background and not only is it a beautiful piece of gaming music but it also serves to relax and helps focus the player even when the solution to a room can be agonizingly close. Having so many factors come together almost effortlessly makes The Turing Test one of the stand out games of this year for me. Completing each chapter left me eager to tackle the next and the further I progressed only opened up more intriguing secrets and layers to the story.
The only issues I found with the game were the constant loading screens between the rooms which broke up the flow a little too much after the a long loading bar at the start of each chapter, and that when using subtitles the audio logs themselves did not have any whilst the dialogue between Ava and T.O.M. did. For accessibility reasons this was a real shame as the audio logs add so much to the story so if you needed subtitles you sadly missed out on quite a bit of extra story telling.
Overall The Turing Test is one of the most enjoyable games of 2016 for me; it delivers great gameplay in the puzzle rooms and has a tremendous story. The voice acting for Ava and T.O.M. bring so much life to both characters as their conversations expand the different themes that the actual Turing Test, developed by Alan Turing in 1950 to see if a computer can fool a human being into believing that it too was human, raise about the future of AI. As a Sci-fi nerd and a technology fan, The Turing Test successfully ticks so many boxes and does so whilst providing a truly great single player experience.
This is definitely worthy of being added to your collection if you are a fan of cleverly designed puzzle games and for a great story told in a refreshing style.
