The Turing Test

There are probably quite a few games inspired by Portal out there. But what got me interested in The Turing Test was its name combined with the name of its protagonist: Ava Turing. I figured that the big twist at the end would be your character turning out to be an artificial intelligence passing the test. I just had to see if that was the case.

The developer, Bulkhead Interactive, also got the game published as part of Square Enix's indie initiative so I knew there would be at least some level of quality assurance behind it. It would not be a complete shit show by some small studio.

Portal without portals

Gameplay-wise The Turing Test is much like the aforementioned Portal. You progress from chamber to chamber, each having a puzzle that needs to be solved to open the way to the next. The puzzles do not get as fancy as Portal's -- Ava's Energy Manipulation Tool is a bit more mundane than Chell's portal gun. The EMT simply collects and shoots energy orbs into receptacles to power different things. There is also barely any platforming or fast-paced sections.

In addition to simply adding more phases to the puzzles, complexity is increased by different kinds of energy orbs. At first you have only perpetually powering blue orbs. But later you will get cyclically powering green and purple ones, as well as orange ones that work only for a short while after being shot into a receptacle. Towards the end of the game you also get to switch your viewpoint to cameras and movable robots.

There was one puzzle -- in the final chapter, I think -- which I solved without ever collecting one energy orb from a blocked section. I got the chamber's door open and confused went back to check what was in the walled part I had not visited. I wonder if that was an intended solution or had the developers just not checked if line of sight had been properly blocked from certain spots.

Each chapter has an optional side room with a puzzle differing from the usual ones. The last one involves using a power cube to block a door from closing completely. Solving the room rewards you with Thinking Outside of the Box achievement.

In my opinion it would have been a whole lot more outside of the box had I known you cannot normally stop doors from closing like that. At no point in the game had I felt a need to try putting a power cube in a doorway and to find out it does not work as the door will close anyway. The game should condition you to that. But as it had not, blocking the door was my first thought when walking into the side room.

My first UE4 experience

The Turing Test runs on Unreal Engine 4. I would say that they could have achieved this game's looks with UE3 already. Object and environmental textures are of surprisingly low resolution even on Ultra. As an added bonus the engine apparently likes to bundle chromatic aberration into some setting and you have to add couple lines to a .ini file to get rid of it. At least the ease of that has not changed from UE3.

The soundtrack composed by Sam Houghton & Yakobo is great at creating a mysterious atmosphere even if it does repeat the main theme quite a bit. But it fits the game's setting very well.

Multiple story-related issues

While the gameplay is entertaining enough, The Turing Test's writing has many problems. There are implausibilities, suspending one's disbelief is nigh impossible, and ludonarrative dissonance is unfortunately very real, especially if you visit the side rooms.

The game starts with Ava being woken from cryosleep aboard Fortuna, a space station (or ship?) orbiting Europa, one of Jupiter's moons. The rest of the crew has landed on the moon to build a base and Ava had been left on the orbit as some kind of backup person.

TOM, or Technical Operations Machine, an AI watching over the project has lost contact with the ground team and your task is to go see what has happened. You get into your suit, grab your EMT, and without even eating breakfast get ready to land on Europa. And then the narrative problems start.

As Europa is smaller than Earth and has weaker gravity (0.134 g), the first thing I tried on the surface was to jump. Ava was able to get about 10 cm off the ground which somehow does not seem right to me. I guess it would have been harder to design puzzles if Ava could have jumped and climbed over obstacles. The surface was also quite bright for a moon that is about 5 times farther than Earth from the Sun.

Then you enter the base that has been altered from its original design to house the test chambers. Even if the base is built from modules like the game tries to reason, rearranging it seems like a gargantuan undertaking for 5 or so people without even considering the fact the base is under the moon's icy surface. And why did the crew do it?

According to TOM, the puzzles appear to be Turing tests, designed to stop it from getting into the complex. This information of course raises the question how an AI capable of having a conversation is not able to solve the puzzles. Apparently its programming prohibits creativity which is an unwanted attribute in an AI given a task like TOM's. That at least sounds plausible but then later on TOM says it is as creative as a human after all.

It makes sense to explain to the player what a Turing test is but how it is done by having TOM to explain it to Ava is ridiculous. How an engineer in a mission like this and whose last name is Turing, for fuck's sake, has never even accidentally heard of the test? How?

The discussion about The Chinese Room experiment gets bit more interesting. In the side rooms you will find stuff related to it and The Turing Test. I also read more about them on Wikipedia and learned that Eliza Cassan's name in the new Deus Ex games is quite on the nose. Though I guess Deus Ex has never been about subtlety in its subtexts.

In the main and side rooms you also find information about the game's events. And Ava never mentions anything of it to TOM. She does not even seem to knowledge the stuff herself. It is like the dialogue was written for a player that runs through the game without ever stopping to touch anything optional. The dissonance is quite off-putting, especially having just played SOMA.

This starts in the first optional room already. You are sort of not meant to get in there immediately as the room is protected by a 5x5 grid with two energy orbs needing to be put in the right slots. You can apparently find the correct combination later on (I never did) or simply brute force the lock (like I did).

Later on (and this gets spoiler-heavy) you will find out the reason for everything is the team has found a micro-organism (or virus?) that is able to mend damaged cells by using DNA from other cells. This means it can stop aging process when introduced into other beings. And of course the team decides it is time to live forever without ever considering the possible negative consequences.

What happens if a child gets exposed to it? Or cancer cells? You are never told how the crew countered (or tried to) TOM's arguments, thus there is no reason to think it is in the wrong in trying to stop the crew from ever returning to Earth.

It should have actually been very easy as every crew member (including Ava) has a chip installed which allows TOM to control them. They apparently agreed to it, although it appears none of them remembers the fact. The crew of course learns about the chips and proceeds to remove them, which is why Ava is now down on Europa.

At the end you get to decide as TOM if you want to stop the crew from shutting down the AI. That made me wonder about the First Law of Robotics. How does it work when a human is about to harm another, and the only way to stop it is to harm the human? Though I guess in this case the added Zeroth Law would force TOM to act in order to protect humanity.

But whatever you decide, the game then congratulates you for passing the Turing test.