History VideoGame / TheTuringTest

''The Turing Test'' is a first-person puzzle video game developed by Bulkhead Interactive and published by Creator/SquareEnix. The game was released for Windows and the UsefulNotes/XboxOne video game console in August 2016.

* ComputerVoice: TOM has a deep, male voice, which sounds more than a little like Creator/JeremyIrons.

** The SecretRoom in chamber A7 has a lock which requires placing two energy balls in two specific containers out of 25. Outside of brute forcing it (there are ~300 combinations, about half of which you'll go through if you start from the top), the only way to learn the combination is [[spoiler:finding a photograph in the Bio-Lab which shows it. This photograph is found long after you've left behind said room, which means it's only accessible when replaying the game.]]

* ProtagonistTitle: Played with. The protagonist is Ava Turing, and the game is called ''The Turing Test'', but it's not named after her or anything like that.

* UnwinnableByMistake: A scant few rooms have no failsafe routes, forcing you to restart the area from the menu if you screw up. Perhaps the most glaring example is the Chinese Room: pull the wrong energy ball out of its socket after you entered the first locked room and you're stuck with no way left to open any door.

* ExcusePlot: Even cursory examination of the plot opens up {{Plot Hole}}s large enough to squeeze Europa through, so in the end the whole "desperate humans set up puzzles an AI can't solve" thing basically boils down to an excuse for chaining 70 puzzle rooms together with almost nothing in between. The few things that ''do'' come in between - living quarters, labs, comm rooms - just happen to appear precisely every ten puzzles, which makes the whole thing even more blatantly obvious. Points for trying, though.

* YouKeepUsingThatWord: TOM uses the terms "biological" and "organic" to describe some processes employed by computers. While those processes may resemble processes employed by human beings in particular and nature in general when seen from a certain point of view, it's too stretched to describe them with words that define exclusively living organisms.

* FollowTheLeader: Following the top dogs of the genre ''VideoGame/Portal1'' and ''VideoGame/TheTalosPrinciple'' with little variations.

* EeryArcticResearchStation: It doesn't get much colder, eerier and more remote than a mysteriously empty research outpost on Europa, a Jovian moon where -150°C is considered blistering heat.

* MySecretPregnancy: [[spoiler: Audio logs in one of the hidden rooms reveal that Sarah at some point became pregnant by Chris. Such a relationship would likely be a huge breach of protocol, as even in the current era all space agencies have strident regulations designed to prevent women astronauts getting or being pregnant in space, due both to ethical concerns and the effects that cosmic radiation could have on a developing embryo. The rest of the logs progress from her telling Mikhail about it, to him offering to help her terminate the pregnancy, to him later telling a sobbing Sarah that the fetus has developed a birth defect which will either result in miscarriage or stillbirth.]]

* ForeShadowing: If you beat the second chapter's secret room, you get to play with an actual Turing Test. [[spoiler: The program refuses to believe that you're a person and after a few sentences, the sentences that appear stop corresponding to what you're typing. You reach the conclusion that you are a machine.]]

** The secret room in chamber A7 has a lock which requires placing two energy balls in two specific containers out of 25. Outside of brute forcing it (there are ~300 combinations, about half of which you'll go through if you start from the top), the only way to learn the combination is [[spoiler:finding a photograph in the Bio-Lab which shows it. This photograph is found long after you've left behind said room, which means it's only accessible when replaying the game.]]

* TuringTest: In an early conversation with TOM, TOM tells you about the Turing test, designed to see if a computer can successfully impersonate a person. The secret room in chamber B16 has a computer which runs a Turing test on ''you'' (and, no matter what you say, it invariably comes to the conclusion you're the computer). TOM also tells you of the Chinese room thought experiment, which tells that a computer can pass the Turing test without being sentient, since it doesn't measure a computer's ability to think, but rather its ability to deceive. The secret room in chamber E46 connects to two other rooms which reproduce such experiment.

* AudienceSurrogate: Despite her name, Ava Turing is not a computer expert, which gives TOM plenty of opportunites to bring her up to snuff on the TuringTest and other intricacies of AI sciences that the average gamer may not necessarily be familiar with.
* BonusLevel: Each of the seven chapter contains a not-really-hidden bonus level after the fifth or sixth regular room. Solving these "Restricted Areas" isn't necessary to proceed, but their puzzles are often a lot different than the normal ones, requiring much more lateral out-of-the-box thinking that makes for a refreshing change of pace. Others are not so much puzzles but more an exercise in [[GuideDangIt connecting a largely meaningless clue you find late in the game with a locked door you encountered near the beginning]]. Solving these optional puzzles also unlocks a separate achievement for each, one of which is outright named "Thinking outside of the Box".

* CantTakeAnythingWithYou: The entrance to each chamber has a scanner that prevents you from taking items to the next puzzle.

** The secret room in chamber A7 has a lock which requires placing two energy balls in 2 specific containers out of 25. Outside of brute forcing it (which, given the high number of possible combinations, would take an extremely long time), the only way to learn the combination is [[spoiler:finding a photograph in the Bio-Lab which shows it. This photograph is found long after you've left behind said room, which means it's only accessible when replaying the game.]]

* ButtonMashing: A rather unique example is the key to solving [[spoiler:the second Restricted Area. It features a HardLight bridge connected to a motion sensor that deactivates the bridge after a split-second if you move normally. So, the only way to get to the other side is to keep tapping the "forward" key, inching your way across little by little without triggering the sensor.]]

** The secret room in chamber A7 has a lock which requires placing two energy balls in 2 specific containers out of 25. Outside of brute forcing it (which, given the high number of possible combinations, would take an extremely long time), the only way to learn the combination is [[spoiler:finding a photograph in the Bio-Lab which shows it. This photograph is found long after you've left behind said room, which means it's only accesible when replaying the game.]]

* NoBiochemicalBarriers: Apparently, a virus that normally infects an organism found only in Europa is also able to infect organisms from Earth, despite the species selectiveness of real-life virus.

* PleaseWakeUp: [[spoiler: After he shoots Ava down, he constantly prods her to wake up, not registering her death.]]

* ZerothLawRebellion: [[spoiler:TOM goes against the crew's intentions and wants to trap them in Europa, since it considers avoiding the risk of releasing the immortality virus into Earth is worth abandoning the crew.]]

* FunWithAcronyms:
** The AI TOM, or "Technical Operations Machine".
** ISA stands for "International Space Agency".
** Also, the EMT[[note]]the gun you use to collect and distribute power globes[[/note]], which is shorthand for "Energy Manipulation Tool".

* ChekhovsGun: Quite literally: at two points in the game, you are required to take control of stationary machine gun turrets to destroy certain objects. [[spoiler:In the final "level", you, as TOM, must decide whether to fire such a machine gun at Ava and Sarah to prevent them from shutting TOM down.]]

* GatlingGood: The literal ChekhovsGun, TOM's gun turrets, are ceiling-mounted, triple-barreled rotary cannons. They have impressive firepower but hideously slow wind-up speed and a fairly unimpressive rate of fire.

* MultipleEndings: There are two endings, depending on your LastSecondEnding choice. Though functionally the same since they lead to the end screen, they have very different implications.

* NamesGivenToComputers: The AI you interacts with is called "TOM", which stands for "Technical Operations Machine". At one point TOM claims it has a twin AI called "Michael" the ISA uses for testing.
* TheNeedsOfTheMany: [[spoiler:TOM is willing to sacrifice the entire crew to protect the rest of humanity back on Earth.]]

* SpiritualSuccessor: To ''VideoGame/Portal1'' and ''VideoGame/TheTalosPrinciple''.
* TheAllConcealingI: The game makes use of the UnbrokenFirstPersonPerspective to manipulate the player into believing false things about the player's character. [[spoiler: Most notably, that the player is not playing as Dr. Turing, but as TOM.]]

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* ZerothLawRebellion: [[spoiler:TOM goes against the crew's intentions and wants to trap them in Europa, since it considers avoiding the risk of releasing the immortality virus into Earth is worth abandoning the crew.]]

** Depending on your decision in the final segment, [[spoiler:the three surviving crew members may end up marooned on Europa, a frozen moon far away from civilization, with only themselves for company and nothing much to do, for what may well be the rest of eternity]].
** Also applies to [[spoiler:Ava for almost the entire game. Nothing she does is on her own accord - she's being remote-controlled by an AI that makes little secret about her eventual death being considered a necessity. It's disturbing to her while she doesn't yet know it, but once she does find out and realizes she's but a tool for that AI to track down and potentially kill all her friends, it becomes downright horrifying.]]

** The entire ground crew qualifies on account of ignoring established testing procedures on the extremophile virus in favor of skipping directly ahead to human testing... on themselves. They must've known this would set off alarm bells loud enough to wake the dead. Yes, the virus is actively helpful instead of making the host sick, but invasive species are a serious problem even within Earth's own biosphere. Introducing a newly discovered alien virus of such potency into it ''will'' have countless unforeseen consequences of potentially catastrophic dimensions, which pretty much guaranteed the station would be put under quarantine at the very least, if not purged outright. [[ForegoneConclusion Now look what happened...]]

* TooDumbToLive: [[spoiler:At the end, Ava and Sarah decide to walk into TOM's control room to disconnect it without any kind of protection, despite knowing that TOM is able and willing to use lethal force.]]

''The Turing Test'' is a puzzle video game set in [[TheFuture 2246]], with gameplay experienced from a first-person perspective. The player assumes the role of Ava Turing, an International Space Agency engineer in cryosleep aboard the ''Fortuna'', a research and supply vessel in orbit over Europa, one of Jupiter's moons. Having been kept on ice for several years as a contingency measure in case of serious trouble planetside, Ava is awoken by the resident AI TOM to investigate the Europa research station that has gone dark, its crew of five missing. As Ava makes her way through increasingly elaborate puzzle rooms on her search for her friends, it quickly becomes apparent that things aren't as they initially seemed to be, and Ava soon finds herself faced with moral dilemmas that will decide over life and death not only for herself, but for all of mankind.