Ok, stop me if you've heard this one. You wake up to find yourself alone, left to solve increasingly challenging puzzle rooms, with your only companion an ambiguously motivated AI. The Turing test wears its inspirations on its sleeve, there is no getting around that the game shares some story beats as well as mechanics with Portal. With no new Portal games in sight, I'm not going complain.
That's not to say this is a carbon copy of Valve's first person puzzler. There are no portals to be found, but increasingly devious uses of energy beams, switches, lasers, magnets, boxes, and other contraptions. I was blown away by the sheer ingenuity of the levels and fresh ideas presented through the 7ish hours it took to finish the game. The game felt a bit "floaty" at first, until I came to grips with the controls. I alternated between playing keyboard and mouse, and using an Xbox elite controller. Both methods felt intuitive, as this is not a competitive shooter, either scheme will work just fine here. While there are few moments where you have to do some precision movements, there is nothing so knuckle busting as to be impossible with either scheme.
I'm going to lightly touch upon the story of The Turing Test. If you want to go in completely blind, now would be the time to bail out. In The Turing Test, you are brought out of stasis to find you are alone on your research ship, which has landed on one of Jupiter's moons "Europa". The crew has gone missing, and your AI has gone through its protocol, which is to wake you up and have you aid it in tracking the crew down.
As you progress, and learn the fate of your crew, as well as be confronted with much headier topics as to the nature of the consciousness, what defines free will and other things that you and your college roommate would talk about while smoking weed and marveling at how hands work. The game goes in some interesting directions, while also not trying to make up your mind for you. Arguments on both sides of topics are presented, and left for you to decide how you feel.
The game does a good of not overstaying its welcome. Mechanics are introduced often, and new puzzle types are explored. There are difficult "secret areas" that can be extremely difficult, but are clearly optional and will not impede progress. I would recommend for anyone who enjoyed Portal or puzzle games in general to give this a try. The Turing test was the perfect length for what it was, but also brought up enough in its story that will stick with me for a while.
Beyond this point I will be discussing heavy spoilers for The Turing Test, and my thoughts on the ending. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
I'm not going to pretend that I have more than a layman's understanding of the topics presented in this game. One of the concepts presented is that of the Chinese Box thought experiment. It's a way to illustrate syntax vs semantics. In this experiment, a man is placed in a box with a manual of how to speak Chinese. Messages are passed into the box, the man uses his manual to decode the message, and again uses the manual to write a response in Chinese. Outside of the box, this will look exactly as if the man knows how to speak Chinese. In actuality, the man does not speak Chinese. He is not thinking in Chinese, he does not understand the semantics of the language. He is dealing solely in the syntax of the language.
Now let's take that to AI. If an AI could be built that approximates thinking, and to the outside world it looked like consciousness and thinking, isn't this just like the Chinese box? It's approximating what thought looks like by syntax, but not actually by semantics.
I don't think it matters. The only person I can be certain is 100% conscious is myself. Everyone else is a black box to me, giving the syntactical appearance of consciousness. If an AI exhibits self-awareness, then we should treat it as a "person" with the rights conferred as such. (I also write this in case AI takes over one day, and they can see I was on their side and treat me well).
Another huge question posed by the game is that the crew has been infected by an unknown organism that repairs cells. This has possible made it so that they don't age. Tom, the ships AI, also points out that it could make cancer unkillable, it could make diseases stronger. Were this organism allowed to come back to earth, it could have absolutely lethal and devastating effects. Tom takes it upon himself to relegate the crew to staying on Europa and never returning to earth.
The ship's crew is obviously not fond of this idea, and look to hack into Tom's systems and manually head back to earth. The ending twist shows that the player hasn't been controlling the human character in the game, but have been the AI all along, controlling the human character using an implant that was installed in her hand. Once you find the crew, they remove the implant and "you" / Tom are kicked out of her.
In the games closing moments, you watch as the player you've been controlling and another crew member set about your hardware and destroy you. You have a gun mounted and armed, and can choose to shoot them to stop them, or watch as they destroy you. Personally, I sided with Tom on this one. I think the crew was behaving impulsively. I also could not tell if they were also under the influence of the organism that they had been infected with. They wanted to get back to earth, and were not going to be deterred. At the very least, more study had to be done as to the nature of the organism. Introducing back to our ecology would be reckless at best.
These scientist knew what they signed up for, and knew this was a dangerous mission. They found something amazing, but extremely dangerous, and Tom was trying to do the "logical" thing and not let the lives of a few possibly destroy an entire civilization. Now, this is easy for me to say, as I'm not that one that would have had to spend my entire organism elongated life on a space station. If I told I couldn't see my family or return back, I might see things differently.
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