If I were to tell you that it was a highly (*moderately) sophisticated AI who had written all these Indie game reviews over the years, with what were deliberate typos and bad jokes, would you believe it? How could you prove otherwise? Nothing about my profile here suggests I'm a real person after all; my designated country of origin is the obviously made-up sounding "United Kingdom". Like, a united kingdom of what? Elves? That sort of "what is artificial and what is real intelligence?" quandary lies at the heart of Bulkhead Interactive's The Turing Test, named for the famous if perhaps inaccurate machine intelligence test that checks if an AI can pass as a human via polite conversation.

As Dr. Ava Turing, presumably no relation given the original Turing didn't seem like the "wife and kids" type, the player is tasked with visiting a research base on the Galilean moon of Europa to locate its missing crew. The crew, it turns out, have deliberately shielded themselves from being detected by the base's nigh-omniscient supercomputer AI T.O.M. and a large part of the plot's mystery is determining whether something's wrong with them or if something's wrong with the AI. To the game's credit, it offers plenty of clues early on to suspect either possibility: the ground team working at the station are there because they found microbial beings deep under Europa's frozen surface, and there's a possibility they've somehow been infected and have turned unreasonably paranoid. Or it could just be the AI's a bad 'un and pulling an Ash from Alien by following unethical secret orders from its corporate overlords of which the human crew were incognizant.

The gameplay flits between a Portal and a Tacoma, with each of the game's chapters broken up into ten puzzle rooms followed by the exploration of a lived-in area of the base that the player can search and interact with for clues surrounding the crew's disappearance, including computer terminals, objects of interest, and audio logs. The puzzle rooms tend to revolve around moving power sources around a room or series of rooms to activate nodes that switch on necessary doors and other mechanical devices, using a pistol that can pull the power from some sources and redistribute it into others. If you've spent time with Final Fantasy X and its many temple puzzle rooms, it's similar to that but with a ranged Portal gun that can transfer those blue energy orbs remotely (though some power sources are locked to their battery-like containers, which adds an extra layer to the puzzle as you physically transport them to where they're needed). The Talos Principle is probably the game's closest antecedent spiritually-speaking; there's some similar laser-based puzzles, and the philosophical musings on artificial intelligence and the game's frequent questioning of your own character's sense of reality and lack of agency in this process has a familiar vibe to it. It's the sort of game narrative approach where it intends to smoosh your brain like putty on multiple levels.

I've presently completed four chapters (or forty rooms) out of a total of seven, and the game's just dropped a huge revelation on us and asked us for a certain amount of faith going forward. Felt like a good time to take a moment to write up my impressions so far, though they may yet change as I approach the back half of the game and the increased difficulty of these final areas. I've only encountered one puzzle room so far that took me longer than five minutes to solve, which probably speaks more to the game's coherent design behind its puzzle scenarios than to my own mental prowess, but I imagine the metaphorical brick walls are going to start popping up in sooner intervals. Mostly, the game's been responsive and intuitive: the two things that can often make or break a physics-y first-person puzzle game like this, though you do get the occasional annoyance with timed sections or areas where you're meant to drop a box onto a switch only for that box to roll off because the physics weren't playing nice that day. Splitting the game into so many discrete puzzle rooms has the additional benefit of not making any one of them overly long or elaborate; some only exist to briefly introduce a new mechanic that future rooms in the same chapter might build upon further, like blocking lasers to disable barriers or differently-colored orbs that only transfer power intermittently thereby creating an on/off activation loop which may or may not prove beneficial. Transferring the orbs with the energy gun only requires a line-of-sight, so the game often factors in windows and other incorporeal obstacles into its solutions, so it's necessary to look at every angle to see what can be accessed remotely.

You do run into that Portal quandary where, out of design necessity, if something distinct like a weirdly shaped wall exists in that room it's probably because you need it for the puzzle at some stage; once you've identified everything of that nature, it becomes much easier to connect all these figurative dots and glean the solution. Other than that inescapable quirk of this genre, along with a few typos here and there as well as the unusual choice to provide subtitles for the speaking characters but not for the much more garbled audio logs, the game has exhibited that winning combination of smart and thoughtful between its puzzles and narrative, with lateral thinking conundrums that make perfect logical sense in retrospect (if not always in the moment, though isn't that always the way). I'm always down for these spacebound mystery adventure/puzzle games, and I'm definitely going to see the rest of the game through if I can.

Rating: 4 out of 5.