With the coronoavirus putting us all on lock-down, I figured it was a good time to play some of the Switch games I randomly bought and never tried. I love using the Switch for puzzle games, visual novels, point-and-click adventures, etc. This is where most of my collection now resides. One such game I never heard of until a random store search was The Turing Test, and the brief description hinted it was right up my alley. As I searched for a game to kick off the coronacation, The Turing Test caught my eye. It was the perfect start to cleaning out my Switch digital backlog.
I love puzzle games, but I’m picky about them. I loved Portal, but I will not try The Witness. If you center the puzzle around a mystery, then I’m all in. That’s the only reason why I suffered through so many bad Professor Layton games. The last game I played that comes to my mind that was both a puzzle game and a mystery was The Station, which I loved. The Turing Test appeared to run in the same vein and check all the same boxes.
If you take The Station…
With The Station, the player character is sent to a space station to learn why the crew has gone silent. It’s mostly a “walking simulator” where you uncover clues about where the crew might be and solve puzzles to unlock audio and video logs. It’s a thrilling mystery that stunned me at the very end. Similarly, The Turing Test also features the player character trying to figure out why the ground crew on a space exploration mission has gone silent.
The difference here is that it’s not a true walking simulator. There are puzzles to solve, but the puzzles aren’t there for the player to solve to uncover more of the mystery. With The Station, the entire space station was open to the player. The player solved puzzles to get into locked areas and to find more clues as to what happened to the crew. The Turing Test requires puzzles to leave the room you enter. This is where the other half of the mashup comes in.
…and mix it up with Portal…
The player controls Ava Turing, an engineer that that the onboard AI, TOM, woke up to find the ground crew. They’re all on a base on Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, which happens to also be the moon that developed life in Space Odyssey 2010. I don’t want to believe that’s a coincidence. I’m not sure why Ava was still in cryostasis, but without her, there would be no mystery to solve. TOM appears to be panicked about the welfare of the crew, especially since he can’t locate them anywhere. He isn’t sure if they’re alive or dead, which feeds into the panic of Ava to find them as soon as possible.
The base extends deep underground with various rooms and levels. The crew has locked up the rooms so that the only way to get through them is to solve puzzles that build upon difficulty. Basically, Ava has to find a way to power the exit doors. To do so, she has to move energy balls to power different doors, contraptions, etc. And naturally, the only way to do so is with a device that looks like a gun, but totally is NOT a portal gun.
At least there aren’t any turrets or really anything to kill you. Your only fear in getting through it is frustration at finding the solution and the occasional timed run. Those levels nearly broke me, but there was really only one that gave me great difficulty in getting the timing down pat.
A Mystery Worth Uncovering
As Ava tests with TOM by her side, she gets the feeling that not everything is how TOM portrays it to be. If the player solves the optional room puzzles—which I highly recommend—you will learn a little more as to what is going on with the crew and why they are hiding from TOM.
I have to say that I had so many guesses as to what happened to the crew, and none of them were correct. The game doesn’t reveal all at the very end; instead the big truth comes out during the final level below Europa’s surface. While you’d think there wouldn’t be many reasons to play after you learn the truth, The Turing Test keeps one last shocking surprise at the very end. I’m still haunted by the final choice I had to make. I think I made the right choice, but it doesn’t mean that I’m cool with the result.
In addition to the story being so great, the puzzles were incredibly addictive. I stayed up way too late most nights swearing that I could not sleep without solving this one last puzzle. I think we all know how these puzzle games go. There’s never one last puzzle.
Most likely by now, you’ve heard of The Turing Test, as it released on Steam in 2016 and PS4 and Xbox One in 2017. I didn’t hear about it until it released on Switch in February 2020. If you’re like me and you haven’t heard about this game and how great it is, I cannot recommend it enough.
The Turing Test review code for Switch was purchased, not provided by developer or publisher.
The Turing Test
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