The Turing Test (Nintendo Switch) Review

Comparisons to the Valve hit will inevitably be drawn when looking at games like The Turing Test. Whether it kicked off the FPS puzzle genre or popularised it, it is hard not to think of Portal. There is a distinct lack of, well, portals in this, though, and it is clear other inspirations come in the form of another similar type of game: that of The Talos Principle. The Turing Test may not quite reach the lofty heights of either of these two puzzlers, but it certainly stands on its own two feet and deserves recognition.

It is the distant future, and mankind is well into its space travel escapades. Ava Turing wakes up from cryostasis to T.O.M - the Technical Operations Machine - telling her that her crewmates researching on Jupiter's moon Europa are in danger. Setting off immediately to land onto the nearby natural satellite, Ava is faced with sequences of puzzles in locked-down rooms, much in the vein of the aforementioned Portal. It is the player's mission to complete each one before moving onto the next, unravelling the plot as they go.

Puzzles encompass a variety of tests, with the core feature being the Energy Manipulation Tool - a gun used to absorb and shoot balls of power that activate objects such as doors, platforms and magnetic cranes. While blue orbs keep a constant power source going strong, different coloured orbs have time limits or activate intermittently, so there is a lot of experimenting, switching orbs around throughout each room to get doors and platforms moving at the right times, allowing Ava to progress. In addition, mobile robots that have a funny look of Nintendo's R.O.B about them can be used to further explore sectors, acting like a buddy to hold down switches and turn on special circuits that Ava does not have the ability to do herself.

For the most part, puzzle challenge progresses in a respectable fashion, with new elements introduced at a steady pace that rarely overwhelms the player. Just when things start to feel slightly on the repetitive side, the introduction of something fresh comes into play, such as the ability to control one of T.O.M's "R.O.B" units. Is it all perfectly balanced, though? Not entirely.

Even in the final chapters, extremely short and simple puzzles can crop up right between the more taxing and lengthy ones. These aren't even "introductory" rooms that ease the player into learning a new method, either. They just seem to be oddly placed, perhaps as a means of trying to break up the more challenging rooms - although it makes little sense when the simple ones are done so quickly, since it's right back to being in a complex test again. There are a few (almost) missable secret rooms throughout the game that offer some of the tougher challenges for good measure, although more unlockable ones for beating the game would have been a nice bonus.

Difficulty in general? Progressively harder, with mostly balanced gameplay, and something that can get the head cogs turning, but never feels impossible to achieve. A bit more variety may have gone some way to prevent things from getting a little too samey, however.

What keeps the desire to see The Turing Test through to the end is the brilliant plot. While the majority of storyline is told through the brief dialogue interactions between the player-controlled Ava and T.O.M, the artificial intelligence guiding her through, there are a few audio logs and text files to be found in areas preceding the next chapter, as well as after completing the bonus rooms. They shed a little more light on what has been going on beneath Europa, yet it is not just the topic of the crewmates that makes the narrative so intriguing.

The Turing Test throws up all sorts of logical questions and theories regarding AI, consciousness and morality. This is a game that, once completed, will have you strongly thinking and perhaps even discussing with others on the numerous subject matters present. This game has a short run time, but a lot to say.

Log file texts can be quite difficult to read due to their small and unclear fonts, and subtitles not only disappear before the speaker has said them, but they have quite a few grammatical errors. Unskippable credits are always a pain, too. As for this Switch port, it doesn't have a high frame rate, but it's stable, with a pleasingly colourful sci-fi visual aesthetic, despite some blurry textures creeping in.