Update Twenty-Seven: 28 July 2017
the Turing Test
10 hours, 15 of 15 achievements
tsuper review: 5/10
☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆
Shallow writing, wonky physics, and only okay puzzle design make the Turing Test a… very bland game.
This game was made for me - space stations, AI, and puzzles? That’s MY SHIT. Unfortunately, I played this game before, and better. I played the Talos Principle (Turing Test references the mythical Talos, too, funnily enough) which answers questions about “what is the measure of a non-human?” and “what is the ethics of human mortality vs human morality?” way, WAY better in a way more interesting, engaging, smartly written way. Portal set the standard of the ‘physics puzzles in lab rooms’ and there really isn’t any way to do a game in a similar setting without inviting comparison and, inevitably, failing to measure up.
In the Turing Test, you play as Ava Turing, awoken from stand-by cold sleep in a station orbiting one of Jupiter’s planets, Europa. The space station AI, Tom, has lost contact with the ground crew on the surface of the moon, so you’re tasked to go find them. When you get to the outpost on the moon, you find the ground crew had purposefully cut contact with the station and, therefore, Tom. They… then… built a series of puzzle rooms (70 of them. I’m not kidding) in an attempt to keep Tom out, because Tom is incapable of lateral or ‘creative’ thinking. That’s where you come in.
So, already, the set-up is pretty weak as an excuse for WHY you play through dozens of these test rooms . The story beats only get stupider. The main conflict of the plot is revealed to be that the ground team had discovered a single-celled organism that repairs DNA, effectively stopping death by decay. All of the team was infected by this organism. This organism was found, however, to continually repair ALL TYPES of DNA - including that of cancers and viruses. There is no way to decontaminate the ground crew, a group of six or so people. Tom declares that they cannot return to Earth because this would be catastrophic to humanity - life would be forever, but so would suffering. The ground crew… a bunch of hardcore trained scientists… who knew this mission was risky and chose to accept it… flip their shit and try to sabotage Tom so they could go home. Ava, your player character, agrees. The big moral conflict is ‘should we sacrifice these six or sacrifice LITERALLY ALL OF HUMANITY???’ Tom is the bad guy for making them stay on Europa. Totally..
The main conflict and conceit of the game is so shallow it’s ridiculous, and the characters act in the most melodramatic of ways. The personalities you hear play out in audio logs or read in emails come off as high schoolers, not people at the top of their field on a mission.A lot of the voice acting is pretty bad, doing the shallow writing no favors. The puzzles are muddled, either way too easy or so sprawling its hard to figure out what is necessary where. The physics system is also pretty bad compared to the pin-tight precision of the Portal games. Everything is surface with no substance. It runs nice, though, and looks good even on my laptop with the settings turned pretty low.
Next up: Monthly challenge, three of five - time to clean!
See you soon!
Sorry to hear, you didn’t enjoy the game too much. But it also means, that I don’t miss anything by not playing it I guess :D
Never intended tbh, although all appealed to me… but the fact that it seems to be fp. And fp gets me literally sick. So nope. Not gonna do that :D
Good luck with your next game! :)
Have a nice weekend :)
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You are right! And they work. At least a bit and for some time. Since I still kinda avoid games that make me feel unwell I don’t get to test them that often. But if I use them, they seem to keep it a bit at bay :)
It’s actually a lot about training. But I feel so not motivated to train not getting nauseous, because it’s a loooong and tiring road :D
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I enjoyed playing Turing Test, also enjoyed playing both Portal games as well as Talos Principle(all 3 played before getting them on steam). Puzzles were fun, not too difficult, so great for relaxing :)
Story was ok, could have been better, but i liked the setting. I don’t remember voice acting being bad, maybe since English is not my first language it sounded ok to me. Graphics was cool, agree with it looked great on somewhat lower settings.
As of endings there were 4 of them. Letting them both turn off TOM, killing just one of them and letting the other turn off TOM, and killing them both. I wanted to kill just Sarah, but since i didn’t know who was who i let them both live. I wish i knew what happened after that, did i doom humanity or not. And i liked visiting Both Chinese Rooms as well as Captain’s Room in first chapter.
I feel you so much on this, I really disliked the Turing Test. They were two big plot holes for me, and disliking the story didn’t help me appreciate the “puzzle”.
YES. I’m actually historically really bad at picking out plot holes, so for me the big thing is character consistency and the logic of character choices, and that was all over the god damn place.
The biggest stickler is, for me, the crew was SHOWN the results of the organism. Sarah gets pregnant and loses the baby, and I got the sense that the miscarriage was pretty horrific, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the embryo was mutated really badly in a way considering their reactions. Sarah literally has personal literal proof about what Tom is saying…. but fuck that, I wanna go home!!! Like, forreal? Forreal? There IS true horror in what the ground crew and now Ava is expected to do, but because they’re all acting like petulant buttheads its hard to really feel bad for them anymore, so the central struggle is simplified into nothingness.
The characters are so artificial, exactly.
~The thing which bothered me the most is Ava herself. I stopped everywhere I could find some audio, listened to them all, and about half the way I knew that TOM and the crew had a fight because TOM was trying to control them. So from here, two things:
- Ava don’t have ears and is dumb as fuck until the last ten minutes.
- TOM controls Ava since the beginning, and so can actually creatively think by itself and so don’t even need Ava in the first place.
And then : plot twist, we are TOM. Yeah, but we did everything ourself since the beginning, so we have creative thinking ?
-> Maybe we play both, but then it’s poorly exectuted~
And yes, the crew. Please, they should have been ready to make sacrifice if needed, going on such a mission. I can’t believe they have been recruited to go there, if they aren’t ready to hear “sorry, something is wrong, you can’t go home”. And it’s not like they were going to die, they have air and food…
As you can see, I’m very focused on the creative thinking, but the funny thing is that I worked in the past 3 months on Computational Creativity, and we know that it exist, we are starting to achieve it, and seeing a game with main plot is “an AI can’t think creatively” made me really mad XD
I didn’t know about Computational Creativity! That’s so cool! And, yeah, the whole ‘computers can’t think laterally’ vs. the explanation they gave. ‘Why don’t you just weigh the button down with your arm?’ like…. that’s… a real easy fix to not have the computer do that? Solution can not harm self, solution cannot harm others, a few other rules, then…. bam? Especially if this AI is supposed to oversee really complex moral quandaries… that same AI really can’t figure out it should drop the box through the window?
And, right? There was a lot of middle ground just… not covered! Yes they’re stuck there, but what can they do to make life there better? Can they say it’s a malfunction of the return systems so they can talk to their families/get updates from Earth? Can they work together to make life better? No, it’s tantrum time, fuck the other 8 billion humans on Earth.
I had said previously I liked the ending, where I shot both of them, but the perfect encapsulation of what’s wrong with the writing was the very last thing that happens. You shoot Ava and Sarah, and Tom goes… ‘Ava? Ava? Ava? Ava? Ava? Wake up, Ava.’ LIKE TOM DOES NOT KNOW WHAT DEATH IS? LIKE TOM DOESN’T KNOW SHOOTING THEM WILL KILL THEM? He KNOWS what these things are, and then to turn it around to try to play the ‘sad AI doesn’t know it’s what things are’ It’s just so… so… so… bad. So bad.
Fiou, I was thinking I was so weird for totally not recommending this game, with such overall critics on it…
I wish i will be able one day to create an AI which doesn’t know how to push a cube, but have moral crisis, lots of fun ahead XD
It’s good that I still haven’t played Talos Principle - will need to play Turing Test before that then ;) I was interested in what you think about it, and it was a nice read (minus the spoiler parts that I skipped for obvious reasons), although I didn’t expect such a negative reaction, since it was positively received overall XD Oh, well, will need to find out for myself. :)
Oh, yeah, I definitely didn’t dislike the game enough to be like ‘no one play this!’ - I super encourage you to give it a try yourself. I know my opinion is on the uncommon side.
Interesting…I recently played TTT a couple of months ago (May) and I think I enjoyed it more than you did. Maybe that’s because I didn’t get too bogged down by the story…I took it for what it was, and kinda tuned out the parts that weren’t resonating with me. Does that mean I think it was a good story? No, not really. But I was mostly there for the puzzles and graphics. I did like all of the small details in, say, the crew cabins and documents scattered about. I enjoyed picking up every item and inspecting everything I could. I loved just looking around, taking in the beautiful scenery (outside of the test chambers that is). As for the puzzles, well, I think they were about right for me– maybe I need to work on my lateral thinking skills. ;) Some were easier than I thought they’d be– for instance, I’d work really hard to get through an area carrying around an box or an extra charge, just to find out there was another box available or I didn’t need to conserve that charge. I needed a hint from a walkthrough for maybe 1-2 levels and 2 challenge levels…which sounds about right to me– not too hard and not too difficult. Also, I haven’t played The Talos Principle (other than the demo) so I didn’t have that comparison in my mind. And yes, of course TTT is nowhere as good as Portal or especially Portal 2.
Anyway, I’m sorry you didn’t like the game as much. Happy gaming!
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I think it’s because Portal was first puzzle game of this genre. If you played in Portal you start to compare other “Portal - like” games to it. So every time I start puzzle game I’m like “Yeah, I saw this in Portal 2 5 years ago. Yeah, this gun thingy is similar to Portal, they didn’t find new and enjoyable mechanic. Yeah, they use similar physic rules”. But tbh I don’t know exactly why I do this. It’s like automatic? Same way I compare RTS games to Red Alert 2, RPG to Mass Effect (that’s why I don’t really like Dragon Age xD Not my target), god-like games to Black & White and so on.
They are different, but my playing satisfaction will depend on how different they are. If they have new elements, mechanics or something that will amaze me - I consider them to be good. But if I fell like I play in previously beaten and known game - it’s nah. They don’t exist in separate universes. And if I’d play in Turing Test before playing Portal - I’d enjoy it far more. But didn’t, as I constantly had this feeling “I played it already”.
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I don’t know about “others” that compare games like I am, but I can’t also replay something and enjoy it. Only exception is KOTOR and ME, games with multiple routes or games that can be played in 2 totally different ways.
And it’s not only about gaming, but also watching movies, reading books, comics etc. I really can’t re-read the same book twice. Like really. I did it only once - I had read one of Lord of the Rings parts and totally forgot about it. Few years later I borrowed the same book from library and started to read it. And whole time I had impression that something is wrong. I didn’t know why but reading made me really unsettled. I realized that I already read it when Frodo was climbing stairs (when Gollum threw away their food), and thought “oh, that’s why I don’t like to read it”, and went to return it to library.
So it can also play role in fact that I can’t be really satisfied with “Portal like” games : D And not that I like it, I’d prefer to have fresh look on every game I play to enjoy it as much as I could.
Quoted Mskotor: “I constantly had this feeling “I played it already””
That’s pretty much what it is. From the type of puzzles (redirecting energy, using weighted somethings to hold down a button, lateral thinking on purpose) calling Talos Principle to mind and the aesthetic (minimalist, sterile white paneled rooms broken up by lifts and presses, very modular, made to test you, constant conversations with a robot ‘overseer’) calling to mind Portal. I played this game already, and despite some cool things (I like the perspective shifting, THAT’S something new no other game does) the game itself couldn’t overcome that.
OH YEAH GOD AND THE GUN THINGY like… why do you have that? What is its material purpose other than it being a friggin’… half-as-good portal gun? You can only fire one type of energy at once and in reverse order of why you had it? Like…?
I want to gently push back against the idea of being able to enjoy this game if I didn’t compare it to something else. I, uh, I can’t? Like, me experiencing something and going ‘oh, this is like __ but __ ‘ is just… it just happens. Some people’s brains may work differently but that’s what mine does. It’s how I experience things and as somebody who really enjoys looking at things critically it behooves me to see where a work draws its influences from, and why, and how it does things differently. No work of art is above this.
I absolutely believe that this game (Turing Test) would not have existed without Portal or Talos Principle as touchstone references, the way a lot of YA zombie books would not have existed without Max Brooks’ Zombie Survival Guide or World War Z. When you make art, you’re influenced by what’s around you - the art you’ve seen, the world you live in, your personal experiences, etc. Great art blends those references in a new, unique and makes them greater than the sum of their parts. Okay art is just ‘oh it’s Portal/Talos Principle again’.
… but, of course, like absolutely every review and critical essay and academic paper, this is my opinion. Lenor, I’m very glad that you got value out of the Turing Test. The benefit of art is that two different people can look at/experience the same thing and come up with two very different and just as valid conclusions. This was just what mine was!
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Cool! Cool cool cool, successful interaction.
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It wasn’t, and to be honest I think we’re just not doing great on the talking to each other front. I’m getting a lot of hostility from you, and I was from the outset. I took the time to respond, which was before you wrote a response to mskotor so I temporally could not have read it. You responded with a flip one sentence to me, so I did the same.
I’m… this game is not worth it to me to get into something of this length about it, especially because the focus isn’t the Turing Test anymore but rather about… something more personal. How and why we like/think/talk about games? Something closer to nerves that got touched, on both sides. You have a voice and can state it! on your own posts, especially! But if you comment on mine, I’m going to assume it’s because you want to talk about it with me or in response to me. We’re not doing great with responses.
This was not a more successful interaction. I think it’d be best if we didn’t! Let’s cool our jets and focus on something else. I’m going to finish my daddyz game.
They share certain elements, so they naturally get associated, I think. If you asked the TT devs, they might even say they were inspired by these games (unless they think that “admitting” it would somehow lessen their creation). Philosophical discussions with a machine? Talos had something like that, so they might get associated. Lateral thinking puzzles in a sci-fi setting with a gun that shoots some kind of energy-based thing as the mechanic to solving puzzles? Certainly reminiscent of Portal. But that’s not a bad thing IMO, nor is TT the same game; it does have differences from the others.
That said, I don’t necessarily compare them or say one does one thing better than the other, or is a clone, or copies it, etc. And I certainly don’t NOT ENJOY a game like TT just because I’ve seen some similar elements in certain seminal works (Portal, Talos). I enjoyed it on its own. Heck, maybe I enjoyed it because it was a bit Portal-like…because I enjoyed Portal (and esp. Portal 2), so why wouldn’t I enjoy TT? =)
What I think got sidetracked and disappeared from this discussion is that… I mean, yes, I compared Turing Test to two other games, but when I DO judge it on its own, it still comes up short (FOR ME!) If it were more like TP or Portal in more ways I like (writing ways!) I would have liked it more, but on its own merits (esp. the characters, the moral conceit that I outlined in the OP) I felt it was weak.
Fuck I did not expect the Turing Test to be a hotbed of discussion and I don’t want to be a Negative Nathan or Dickhead Darien shitting on a game other people like. I liked the ending! I was really surprised that the game would let me just shoot Sarah and Ava when they got to Tom’s mainframe. I shot them immediately bc I didn’t think they’d actually let me do it. I shot Ava first by accident (how could I have told the difference? space suits is the same) so then I shot Sarah, too. If I had shot Sarah first I would have stopped and waited to see what Ava did, if she’d leave Tom alone or what. That was a cool twist!
Yeah, for me I was more there for the puzzles and graphics…the story part was nice enough I guess but not what I was there for.
And don’t worry about about the discussion. Everybody was just expressing one’s opinions and it sort of took a wrong turn somewhere along the way. Not the first time that’s happened on the Internet (or IRL for that matter).
c: thank you for that kind take, Trent.
Also, I was thinking of you when I made my newest Dream Daddy review - I don’t know if you’re interested in that game, but you being a young with-it dad yourself might appreciate being able to make yourself as your own dadsona!!! I was giving myself a good ol’ laugh thinkin’ about it. (I certainly played through a few times as some of my friends-who-are-dads, sending them screenshots as I did.)
Who said I’m young or with-it? :p
I’m not sure how much appeal that game would have to a cis Dad, but thanks for thinking of me nonetheless. :)
I dunno! You give off a young and/or with-it vibe!!
I think it’ll appeal to anyone who likes a good cute romance story (but that could be my bi-ness talking), and of course c:
Steam seems to agree with you– it just put it in my discovery queue. :p
SEE!!
do not resist, trent. be sure to post a picture of your dadsona and your favorite dad if when you get it c;
one of us…. one of us….