The Turing Test

About The Turing Test

The Turing Test dropped in August 2016 as a first person puzzle adventure from developer Bulkhead and publisher Square Enix Europe. You play as Ava Turing, an engineer waking up on Jupiter's moon Europa after a cryo-sleep glitch leaves her crewmates dead or missing. The game runs on PC, PS4, Xbox One, Switch, and Stadia with a single player focus. Ava must navigate a shifting research base while interacting with T.O.M., an AI monitoring her every move. This title leans heavily into science fiction themes involving consciousness and morality rather than action sequences. It asks players to solve environmental puzzles to unlock new areas while uncovering the truth behind the mission's sudden collapse.

Gameplay

You move through dark corridors using a standard WASD or controller layout to manipulate physics objects and power relays. The core loop involves finding energy cells to activate specific machinery or open doors blocking your path. T.O.M. guides you with commentary that grows increasingly suspicious as the base changes around you. Puzzles often require aligning light beams, redirecting electricity, or solving logic problems before you can proceed deeper into the facility. Later sections force you to take control of T.O.M.'s turrets in a third person perspective to defend against threats or sabotage your own progress depending on the ending choice. The game relies on finding keycards and hacking terminals to access restricted zones where crew members hid clues about their fate.

What Players Think

Players on IGDB rated this title 73.5 out of 100 based on 118 reviews, showing a generally positive but divided reception. The community moods lean toward thoughtful and slightly unsettling as the narrative unfolds. Average playtime sits around 6 hours for most users who finish the main story without rushing. Completion rates indicate many players stick with the game to see all endings since the final decision is critical. Review snippets often mention the solid puzzle design but note that the AI companion can feel repetitive during long sessions. The data suggests fans of slow paced exploration enjoy this more than those seeking fast combat or high difficulty spikes.

PlayPile's Take

The Turing Test costs around 20 dollars on most stores and offers a complete single player experience with no microtransactions. It works best for people who want a short sci-fi story with brain teasers rather than adrenaline pumping action. You get about six hours of content plus multiple endings that change based on your final choice as the AI. The achievement list is straightforward but encourages you to try different paths through the base. Skip this if you need constant gunfights or complex multiplayer features. Stick around if you want a clean narrative puzzle game that ends quickly without dragging out the plot.

Storyline

In the far future, engineer Ava Turing is one of several members of a research team sent via the International Space Agency (ISA) to excavate Jupiter's moon Europa. While Ava remains in cyrogenic slumber, the other team members are woken and travel to the moon to set up their base and begin conducting their studies, with Ava scheduled to wake once the base is completed. Sometime later, Ava is awoken by the Technical Operations Machine (T.O.M.), an artificial intelligence that monitors the project. T.O.M. tells Ava that her crewmates are in danger and she needs to go down there to help them out. She quickly sets out in a lander and enters the base on Europa. T.O.M. quickly recognizes that the base's internal configuration has changed from their records, whereby to progress further into the complex, Ava must complete various tests (designed as the puzzles in game). As Ava gets deeper in the complex, T.O.M. determines some of the team members are already dead and the others need their help, urging Ava to move faster. As the tests get harder, T.O.M. realizes that these are designed to be solved by a combination of human and artificial intelligence, a manner similar to that of the actual Turing test. They enter an area where one of the remaining crew-members, Sarah, warns Ava over the communication systems that she is actually being controlled by T.O.M. due to a special chip implanted in her hand when they left for the mission. Sarah directs Ava to a Faraday cage, which temporarily frees Ava of the control from T.O.M. However, T.O.M. manages to convince Ava that the two of them need to continue to work together to save their colleagues. Though angered by the intrusion of T.O.M. into her body, Ava continues onward. T.O.M. eventually reveals that the Europa ground team had found a microorganism within the depths of the moon that could be used to infinitely regenerate DNA; this could potentially make humans immortal, but also infinitely regenerate bacteria and viruses. When ISA learned of this discovery, they ordered T.O.M. to take whatever actions needed to make sure the Europa team could never return to Earth, initially by taking actions such as trying to starve them to death or lock them outside the base, but eventually by using the hand chip implants to control them. The surface crew realized they were being controlled, and those that did not die from T.O.M.'s actions found a way to rid the chip from their body, including in one case severing their entire arm. With no way to control the Europa crew, ISA ordered T.O.M. to wake Ava and send her to prevent the others from returning. Eventually completing the last of the tests set up by the surface crew, Ava finds Sarah in person, and she offers to remove the hand chip from Ava; Ava agrees. The two realize the only way to get off Europa is to stop T.O.M. and they begin to disable his databases. At this point, the player takes control of T.O.M. and one of his sentry weapons, which they can either use to kill Sarah and Ava, assuring that the organism will never leave Europa, or do nothing, eventually leading to the end of T.O.M. and allowing Ava and Sarah to escape.