I passed!

Finally, a game from that charity bundle which I don't have to dismiss as "for a good cause."

The Turing Test is a Portal-alike, complete with first-person puzzles, a robot narrator, and a relatively-brief running length. What sets it apart from sub-genre peers like Q.U.B.E. and Quantum Conundrum - which felt a little like one-trick ponies falling into a rut - is that Turing continues to introduce new and exciting mechanics, and reveal interesting story twists, throughout that length.

Pacing is hard to get right, but it feels like The Turing Test pretty much nailed it. The game is split into seven chapters of ten puzzles each, with a significant story beat at the end of every chapter; while the game's plot is obviously building up to something, it has some twists up its sleeve up to the very end, and the dialog between protagonist Ava and AI overseer Tom invites some metaphysical curiosity inbetween those twists.

The puzzles, too, are well-paced within each chapter. Later puzzles are more complex than earlier ones but not dramatically so -- most chapters, rather than dialing up a pre-existing puzzle mechanic, introduce a new mechanic to build their puzzles around. Even the final chapter has a few "dunker" puzzles in it. No one chapter feels like a brain-bending slog, and puzzle designs are uniquely fresh all the way through.

My praise for The Turing Test isn't universal: one or two of its puzzles require some annoyingly-specific physics (the barely-perceptible "jump" shouldn't be a puzzle mechanic), one special puzzle requires outright prescience, and some of Tom's philosophical digressions feel awkwardly unprompted.

The biggest disappointment for me was that the game's supporting cast, and their background storytelling in written notes and audio recordings, are really under-polished: their voice acting is flat, the audio quality sucks, and some of the notes' fonts are unreadably blurry. It's to The Turing Test's credit that this category of narrative polish - not overall playability or core storytelling - was my primary issue.

It's a good puzzle game with engaging storytelling. It's no Cave Johnson, but it'll do!

Better than: Magrunner: Dark Pulse
Not as good as: Portal 2
Hard to say against the first Portal: Valve's humor and puzzles got more intricate, while Turing's story and mechanics showed more variety.