Most challenges within The Turing Test are variations on this mechanic. 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.

Players overcome The Turing Test’s challenges via the use of an Energy Ball Extractor Thingy – the technical term was only mentioned once. 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. On that question, there can be no doubt as to the answer: it’s Portal. 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?’ 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. Some of the similarities are so unavoidably direct they flash neon, begging you to make the comparison room by room, challenge by challenge. 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.Īgainst all better sense, The Turing Test does the exact opposite. Every puzzle game to follow Valve’s physics-based gaming oddity has born it’s leaden weight. Naturally, the elephant in the room is the comparison that you’re going to hear often throughout this review: Portal. 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. The experiment is flawed, and it’s a great irony that Bulkhead Interactive’s 3D puzzler, The Turing Test, suffers similar issues of imitation. 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. Imitation isn’t understanding so goes the fatal criticism of Alan Turing’s famous thought experiment. Available on PC (version tested) and Xbox One

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