ShylockSimmonz's Review of The Turing Test

Fantastic Story

User Rating: 8 | The Turing Test PC

By shylocksimmonz | Review Date: October 30, 2019

I was way off about what I expected from The Turing Test. For some reason I expected it to be a walking sim. What I got was a puzzle game like Portal but with a much better story. The story is fantastic and if you like sci-fi will be worth it all by itself. Luckily the gameplay is good and kept me engaged enough regardless. Communication has been lost with a crew of astronauts on Europa and an AI, Tom, and human, Ava, must venture there to figure out what went wrong. The crew has setup a series of rooms that you will have to solve various puzzles in order to advance. After each room there is back and forth between Ava and Tom as both figure out what went wrong and how to solve the issues at hand. You solve the puzzles by using energy cores to open doors, taking control of cameras and bots to manipulate pressure pads and electric locks. One thing I liked was how the game sometimes would throw you a curveball and provide you with tools for the toom that you didn’t require. I spent extra time trying to figure out how it wanted me to use a cube or camera that wasn’t needed. It kept me on my toes. I kind of predicted the possible endings a ways before it happened but it didn’t spoil the fun. The game doesn’t give any long winded explanation about how things played out after the game was done which leaves me to fill in my own ideas which I enjoy.

The graphics are fairly decent. There is a nice clean and crisp style going on which reminds me of 70’s scifi movies that use a lot of blends of white and primary colors. They won’t wow you but they are far from an eye sore. The soundtrack is great and really complimented what was happening well. The voice acting was well done all around but Tom was especially great and provided the right blend of dull logical voices you expect from a computer combined with a hint of emotion at times.

I played The Turing Test on Linux using Proton. Every time I ran the game it would want to install something for UE4 and it would fail. The good news is it didn’t seem to be needed as the game ran fine after you closed that. Trying to use DX12 resulted in a crash at launch but DX11 ran just fine. The game didn’t crash at all during gameplay. I noticed no glitches or bugs. There were five graphics settings as well as four setings for AA; Vsync; and an FOV slider. The FOV slider went from 60-120. There was a cap of 60 FPS regardless of Vsync being on or off. The game ran at a solid 60 FPS except for a few drops to the 40’s but they only lasted a second or two and weren’t frequent. This was with all settings at highest at 1080P and an FOV of 100. During gameplay my total system RAM usage was around 3-3.3GB; my CPU usage was around 11-18%; my GPU usage was around 40-55% and my VRAM usage was around 2.5-2.7GB. There was no manual saving option, just checkpoints after each room.You can choose to restart an entire chapter or just the room if you get stuck. The game uses the Unreal 4 engine.

As I stated before I really enjoyed the story of The Turing Test. It was the standout feature of the game and had a lot of depth that left you pondering over many moral scenarios and questions. The puzzles were overall pretty good with the odd annoying one. I finished the game in 7 hours. I didn’t finish the optional rooms so it could have taken longer. I paid $6.59 CAD for the game and would say it was easily worth $20.

My Score: 8/10

My System: