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* The title, aside from being a play on the fact our main protagonist is named Turing, and the obvious name drop of the classical Turing test, is also entirely the point of the game- it's just that you expect it to be a case of "Human needing to determine if a Machine is human, when the problem of the game is just the opposite- TOM has issues believing Humans aren't machines. Why not? After all, humans are victims of causality and following their own instinctual impulses more than any any logic. That and [[spoiler:He has complete control of the crew, including Ava, and can adjust their moods and impulses. He even outright states that humans don't have free will even without him controlling them.]] The climactic encounter at the end is essentially both parties being subject to a Turing test and deciding the other is a machine- [[spoiler: TOM believes himself to be more "Human" due to his control and logic and sees the rebelling humans as "faulty" and thus valid to kill, while Ava and the others see Tom as a heartless machine rigidly following flawed orders and thus see no problems shutting him down]]. Your decision at the end is which party you feel is "human". Either ending has some regret, as in one you decide on party isn't, and you suffer guilt for it, or you don't, but due to your [[spoiler:previous actions, it's not enough to convince them that you're human or trustworthy]].
**[[spoiler: A TOM that could kill Ava and override its do not kill humans programming is very human indeed, especially if it can feel guilty over it, but a TOM that can't bring itself to kill Ava even with the fate of Earth at stake is equally human...but would be construed as "TOM following his programming to not kill humans" and thus nothing more than a machine to Ava and the others. So the deck was somewhat stacked against Tom in this scenario...]]
**[[spoiler: A TOM that could kill Ava and override its do not kill humans programming is very human indeed, especially if it can feel guilty over it, but a TOM that can't bring itself to kill Ava even with the fate of Earth at stake is equally human...but would be construed as "TOM following his programming to not kill humans" and thus nothing more than a machine to Ava and the others. So the deck was somewhat stacked against Tom in this scenario...]]
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* The very last puzzle seems unsolvable until [[spoiler: you realise that you can use Ava's body in the same way as you could use any other inanimate object, by letting it go around on a moving band to intermittantly block a beam, while you use a robot to go solve the puzzle.]] In other words, to complete the game, you need to [[spoiler: symbolically accept what you've already technically known since halfway through it - that not only are you not playing as Ava, but that Ava is a tool being used by TOM (your ''actual'' player character), functionally no different from any of the cameras, robots and guns that he can also [[VillainOverride "jump into."]]]]
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* The very last puzzle seems unsolvable until [[spoiler: you realise that you can use Ava's body in the same way as you could use any other inanimate object, by letting it go around on a moving band to intermittantly intermittently block a beam, while you use a robot to go solve the puzzle.]] In other words, to complete the game, you need to [[spoiler: symbolically accept what you've already technically known since halfway through it - that not only are you not playing as Ava, but that Ava is a tool being used by TOM (your ''actual'' player character), functionally no different from any of the cameras, robots and guns that he can also [[VillainOverride "jump into."]]]]
** Didn't think of this solution, solved it another way: [[spoiler: by kicking the block and switching agency to a robot before the block lands on a button]].
** Didn't think of this solution, solved it another way: [[spoiler: by kicking the block and switching agency to a robot before the block lands on a button]].
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** Well, it's not even much "fridge" that many game statements make no sense. We have a virus which "repairs DNA by taking DNA of other organisms" (a close analogy would be to repair a book by tearing pages out of random other books), pavlovian conditioning in regards to very complex and subtle behavior, outright hysterical behavior of [[spoiler: Sarah]] on logs in which Ava sees nothing wrong, a completely butchered explanation of Chinese Room experiment (one would expect that at least someone on the crew knew the word "qualia")...
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* How in hell did five people manage to construct such a vast ElaborateUndergroundBase from nothing but modular storage compartments, not to mention while basically on the run from the AI that controls the entire facility they were redecorating? Where did all that tech come from? Why did they even have enough space available in the first place? Many of these rooms are ''massive'', after all. Frankly, the more you think about the backstory, the less sense it makes.
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* At one point, when Ava asks TOM for a solution to one of the puzzles, he advises her to chop off her arm to use to make a weight-controlled switch stay in the "on" position. [[spoiler:If she chopped off her right arm that would have severed his connection with her.]]
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* At one point, when Ava asks TOM for a hypothetical solution to one of the puzzles, he advises her to chop suggests chopping off her arm to use to make hold down a weight-controlled switch stay so it stays in the "on" position. [[spoiler:If she chopped off her right arm that would have severed his connection with her.]]
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Moving to headscratchers | this example isn't fridge logic, it's analysis
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* The mechanism of the extremophile's DNA repair bugs me. ISA and TOM insist on quarantining the scientists citing unstoppable cancer cells and viruses that would be created if the extremophile were to be brought to Earth. This is, of course, a hyperbolic metaphor on the dangers of invasive species, but ignoring the authorial voice for a bit, how exactly is that supposed to work? Assume the extremophile enters symbiosis with a cancer patient, and starts repairing any DNA it finds, both cancerous and healthy. One effect is that it would prevent cancer cells from mutating further, perhaps allowing future medicine to targetedly destroy them faster--thus curing the patient, since their healthy cells will persist. Of course, if the medicine isn't fast enough, the immortal cancer cells will eventually kill the patient, but, as cynical as it sounds, it is safe to assume that most people in the future will not have cancers this bad, and they will be unaffected. Now viruses. Whether the extremophile will be able to do anything for them is up in the air, because they are not even living beings, and depending on how it goes about its symbiosis, it may not even register them as DNA carriers. It may very well, in fact, render actual living beings ''immune'' to some viruses by protecting their own cellular DNA from being modified by virus' RNA strands. With all said and done, the biggest effect the introduction of the extremophile would have is, most likely, the complete freeze of Earth's genetic pool. By constantly repairing DNA of everything, it would preclude any form of genetic mutation and thus, any form of biological evolution that does not rely on sexual reproduction. And even the latter may be rendered impossible if the extremophile sees gene recombination as something to be "repaired" (which may have been the cause of [[spoiler:the death of Sarah's baby]], I'm not sure).
** That's part of the point. A germ (since it's a symbiotic mix of a virus of something else) that just goes about repairing DNA is so extremely ''alien'' to everything we know about cellular biology that the long-term repercussions of infecting an entire biosphere with it can't possibly be predicted with any certainty, and after a bit of thought none of the universal biological immortality futures seem very good. Sexual reproduction is dead and evolution is ''over,'' so the only possible reproduction is by cloning or parthenogenesis. Social evolution is going to stop dead in its tracks because new ideas generally only overcome old ones when the people holding outdated ideas are demographically pushed out of power or just straight up die. The germ doesn't really cure death, it only cures ''aging'', rendering everything ''biologically'' immortal, so there will still be attrition due to accidents, foul play, and people bored with life plugging themselves (and this is the ''best'' case scenario, assuming that the germ doesn't cure cancer). While the Take A Third Option Future may not be as bad as the TOM or the ISA think, it's still going to fundamentally change human civilization and quite probably doom it to a slow stagnation. Exposing the entire planet to it willy-nilly is really the height of recklessness. (For full disclosure, in my playthrough [[spoiler:Sarah and Ava opened the door, but they never made it through it]].)
* The entire game is Turing test on multiple levels. Ava and the crew don't believe TOM is sentient, which means he fails the turing test to them. TOM himself states that he has trouble believing that Humans are sentient, as they are slaves to impulses and instinct, which means that to TOM, Humans fail the turing test. This dynamic is what drives the events of the game, where both parties believe the other to be limited and treat them accordingly. This is a neat critique of the turing test itself, in that due to bias or illogic or issues of culture, both participants could decide the other wasn't human. A nod to this is the [[spoiler:secret turing test within the game that is rigged- no matter what the player enters, their partner has already made up their mind that the player is an AI.]]
** That's part of the point. A germ (since it's a symbiotic mix of a virus of something else) that just goes about repairing DNA is so extremely ''alien'' to everything we know about cellular biology that the long-term repercussions of infecting an entire biosphere with it can't possibly be predicted with any certainty, and after a bit of thought none of the universal biological immortality futures seem very good. Sexual reproduction is dead and evolution is ''over,'' so the only possible reproduction is by cloning or parthenogenesis. Social evolution is going to stop dead in its tracks because new ideas generally only overcome old ones when the people holding outdated ideas are demographically pushed out of power or just straight up die. The germ doesn't really cure death, it only cures ''aging'', rendering everything ''biologically'' immortal, so there will still be attrition due to accidents, foul play, and people bored with life plugging themselves (and this is the ''best'' case scenario, assuming that the germ doesn't cure cancer). While the Take A Third Option Future may not be as bad as the TOM or the ISA think, it's still going to fundamentally change human civilization and quite probably doom it to a slow stagnation. Exposing the entire planet to it willy-nilly is really the height of recklessness. (For full disclosure, in my playthrough [[spoiler:Sarah and Ava opened the door, but they never made it through it]].)
* The entire game is Turing test on multiple levels. Ava and the crew don't believe TOM is sentient, which means he fails the turing test to them. TOM himself states that he has trouble believing that Humans are sentient, as they are slaves to impulses and instinct, which means that to TOM, Humans fail the turing test. This dynamic is what drives the events of the game, where both parties believe the other to be limited and treat them accordingly. This is a neat critique of the turing test itself, in that due to bias or illogic or issues of culture, both participants could decide the other wasn't human. A nod to this is the [[spoiler:secret turing test within the game that is rigged- no matter what the player enters, their partner has already made up their mind that the player is an AI.]]
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The germ is weird and nigh-magical because that's the point
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** That's part of the point. A germ (since it's a symbiotic mix of a virus of something else) that just goes about repairing DNA is so extremely ''alien'' to everything we know about cellular biology that the long-term repercussions of infecting an entire biosphere with it can't possibly be predicted with any certainty, and after a bit of thought none of the universal biological immortality futures seem very good. Sexual reproduction is dead and evolution is ''over,'' so the only possible reproduction is by cloning or parthenogenesis. Social evolution is going to stop dead in its tracks because new ideas generally only overcome old ones when the people holding outdated ideas are demographically pushed out of power or just straight up die. The germ doesn't really cure death, it only cures ''aging'', rendering everything ''biologically'' immortal, so there will still be attrition due to accidents, foul play, and people bored with life plugging themselves (and this is the ''best'' case scenario, assuming that the germ doesn't cure cancer). While the Take A Third Option Future may not be as bad as the TOM or the ISA think, it's still going to fundamentally change human civilization and quite probably doom it to a slow stagnation. Exposing the entire planet to it willy-nilly is really the height of recklessness. (For full disclosure, in my playthrough [[spoiler:Sarah and Ava opened the door, but they never made it through it]].)
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!!FridgeBrilliance
* The very last puzzle seems unsolvable until [[spoiler: you realise that you can use Ava's body in the same way as you could use any other inanimate object, by letting it go around on a moving band to intermittantly block a beam, while you use a robot to go solve the puzzle.]] In other words, to complete the game, you need to [[spoiler: symbolically accept what you've already technically known since halfway through it - that not only are you not playing as Ava, but that Ava is a tool being used by TOM (your ''actual'' player character), functionally no different from any of the cameras, robots and guns that he can also [[VillainOverride "jump into."]]]]
* The very last puzzle seems unsolvable until [[spoiler: you realise that you can use Ava's body in the same way as you could use any other inanimate object, by letting it go around on a moving band to intermittantly block a beam, while you use a robot to go solve the puzzle.]] In other words, to complete the game, you need to [[spoiler: symbolically accept what you've already technically known since halfway through it - that not only are you not playing as Ava, but that Ava is a tool being used by TOM (your ''actual'' player character), functionally no different from any of the cameras, robots and guns that he can also [[VillainOverride "jump into."]]]]
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*The entire game is Turing test on multiple levels. Ava and the crew don't believe TOM is sentient, which means he fails the turing test to them. TOM himself states that he has trouble believing that Humans are sentient, as they are slaves to impulses and instinct, which means that to TOM, Humans fail the turing test. This dynamic is what drives the events of the game, where both parties believe the other to be limited and treat them accordingly. This is a neat critique of the turing test itself, in that due to bias or illogic or issues of culture, both participants could decide the other wasn't human. A nod to this is the [[spoiler:secret turing test within the game that is rigged- no matter what the player enters, their partner has already made up their mind that the player is an AI.]]
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* At one point, when Ava asks TOM for a solution to one of the puzzles, he advises her to chop off her arm to use to make a weight-controlled switch stay in the "on" position. [[spoiler:If she chopped off her right arm that would have severed his connection with her.]]
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* At one point, when Ava asks TOM for a solution to one of the puzzles, he advises her to chop off her arm to use to make a weight-controlled switch stay in the "on" position. [[spoiler:If she chopped off her right arm that would have severed his connection with her.]]]]
* The mechanism of the extremophile's DNA repair bugs me. ISA and TOM insist on quarantining the scientists citing unstoppable cancer cells and viruses that would be created if the extremophile were to be brought to Earth. This is, of course, a hyperbolic metaphor on the dangers of invasive species, but ignoring the authorial voice for a bit, how exactly is that supposed to work? Assume the extremophile enters symbiosis with a cancer patient, and starts repairing any DNA it finds, both cancerous and healthy. One effect is that it would prevent cancer cells from mutating further, perhaps allowing future medicine to targetedly destroy them faster--thus curing the patient, since their healthy cells will persist. Of course, if the medicine isn't fast enough, the immortal cancer cells will eventually kill the patient, but, as cynical as it sounds, it is safe to assume that most people in the future will not have cancers this bad, and they will be unaffected. Now viruses. Whether the extremophile will be able to do anything for them is up in the air, because they are not even living beings, and depending on how it goes about its symbiosis, it may not even register them as DNA carriers. It may very well, in fact, render actual living beings ''immune'' to some viruses by protecting their own cellular DNA from being modified by virus' RNA strands. With all said and done, the biggest effect the introduction of the extremophile would have is, most likely, the complete freeze of Earth's genetic pool. By constantly repairing DNA of everything, it would preclude any form of genetic mutation and thus, any form of biological evolution that does not rely on sexual reproduction. And even the latter may be rendered impossible if the extremophile sees gene recombination as something to be "repaired" (which may have been the cause of [[spoiler:the death of Sarah's baby]], I'm not sure).
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* The mechanism of the extremophile's DNA repair bugs me. ISA and TOM insist on quarantining the scientists citing unstoppable cancer cells and viruses that would be created if the extremophile were to be brought to Earth. This is, of course, a hyperbolic metaphor on the dangers of invasive species, but ignoring the authorial voice for a bit, how exactly is that supposed to work? Assume the extremophile enters symbiosis with a cancer patient, and starts repairing any DNA it finds, both cancerous and healthy. One effect is that it would prevent cancer cells from mutating further, perhaps allowing future medicine to targetedly destroy them faster--thus curing the patient, since their healthy cells will persist. Of course, if the medicine isn't fast enough, the immortal cancer cells will eventually kill the patient, but, as cynical as it sounds, it is safe to assume that most people in the future will not have cancers this bad, and they will be unaffected. Now viruses. Whether the extremophile will be able to do anything for them is up in the air, because they are not even living beings, and depending on how it goes about its symbiosis, it may not even register them as DNA carriers. It may very well, in fact, render actual living beings ''immune'' to some viruses by protecting their own cellular DNA from being modified by virus' RNA strands. With all said and done, the biggest effect the introduction of the extremophile would have is, most likely, the complete freeze of Earth's genetic pool. By constantly repairing DNA of everything, it would preclude any form of genetic mutation and thus, any form of biological evolution that does not rely on sexual reproduction. And even the latter may be rendered impossible if the extremophile sees gene recombination as something to be "repaired" (which may have been the cause of [[spoiler:the death of Sarah's baby]], I'm not sure).
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* At one point, when Ava asks TOM for a solution to one of the puzzles, he advises her to chop off her arm to use to make a weight-controlled switch stay in the "on" position. [[spoiler]]If she chopped off her right arm that would have severed his connection with her.[[/spoiler]]
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* At one point, when Ava asks TOM for a solution to one of the puzzles, he advises her to chop off her arm to use to make a weight-controlled switch stay in the "on" position. [[spoiler]]If [[spoiler:If she chopped off her right arm that would have severed his connection with her.[[/spoiler]]]]
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!!FridgeLogic
* At one point, when Ava asks TOM for a solution to one of the puzzles, he advises her to chop off her arm to use to make a weight-controlled switch stay in the "on" position. [[spoiler]]If she chopped off her right arm that would have severed his connection with her.[[/spoiler]]
* At one point, when Ava asks TOM for a solution to one of the puzzles, he advises her to chop off her arm to use to make a weight-controlled switch stay in the "on" position. [[spoiler]]If she chopped off her right arm that would have severed his connection with her.[[/spoiler]]
