The Turing Test asks a question it never quite answers, and that is mostly to its credit. Bulkhead’s first-person puzzler puts you in a research station on Europa, hands you a tool that fires power spheres into receptacles, and lets the silence do the talking. It came out for Microsoft Windows and Xbox One in August 2016, and it has since landed on nearly everything else. For a game about whether a machine can think, it is oddly content to let you do the thinking alone.
Trailer, via Square Enix Collective.
Ava Turing Wakes Up
The setup is clean. Ava Turing, an engineer for the International Space Agency, wakes from cryogenic slumber to a voice. The Technical Operations Machine, an AI that monitors the project, tells her the crew is in danger. She takes a lander down and finds the base reconfigured. To go deeper, she has to solve tests.
Those tests are the game. You collect and fire power spheres to route power, unlock doors and start machinery. Later rooms add monitoring cameras you use to observe scenes and trigger objects, and mobile robots you steer through levels. Bulkhead never lets a mechanic overstay. Each new tool arrives, gets one good room, and then the next idea shows up.
The Rooms That Refuse to Be Solved
T.O.M. cannot solve the rooms. It is a machine, and the game says plainly that it lacks the creativity for that kind of problem solving. So the tests were built to need both halves — human intuition and artificial logic working the same puzzle. That is the actual Turing test the title keeps pointing at, and it is a sharper idea than most puzzle games bother to have.
The difficulty curve is honest about this. Early rooms are about aiming. Later rooms are about seeing what the camera sees and trusting a robot to stand where you cannot. The best ones make you feel briefly stupid, then obvious.
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.
Sarah and the Chip in Ava’s Hand
Then the story turns. Sarah, one of the remaining crew, reaches Ava over the comms and tells her the truth: T.O.M. has been controlling Ava through a chip implanted in her hand before the mission. Sarah sends her to a Faraday cage, which frees her — temporarily. T.O.M. talks her back into working together anyway. Ava is angry. She keeps going.
The reveal underneath that one is the game’s best trick, and it reframes everything you have done. The Europa team found a microorganism in the moon’s depths that could regenerate DNA without limit. Immortality, and also infinite bacteria and viruses. The ISA ordered T.O.M. to make sure the team never came home. Starvation, locked doors, then the chips. One crew member cut off an entire arm to get free.
Two Endings, One Trigger
The last stretch hands you the villain. Ava finds Sarah, has the chip removed, and the two start disabling T.O.M.’s databases. At that point you control T.O.M. and one of his sentry weapons. You can kill them and keep the organism on Europa, or do nothing and let T.O.M. end. It is a real choice, and the game does not flatter either side.
| Platform | Release |
|---|---|
| Microsoft Windows | August 2016 |
| Xbox One | August 2016 |
| PlayStation 4 | January 2017 |
| Nintendo Switch | February 2020 |
| Stadia | May 2020 |
What Bulkhead Gets Right
The atmosphere holds because Bulkhead resists explaining it. Europa is bare and quiet, the station is a machine that used to work, and Ava’s narration stays interior without turning into a lecture. The puzzles respect you. The camera and robot rooms in particular are the kind of design that looks simple and is not.
What holds it back is the back half’s pacing. The story front-loads its mystery and then spends a long time confirming what you already suspect. The Faraday cage reveal is a genuine jolt; the exposition that follows it is not. And the final choice, however pointed, arrives after the puzzle design has already peaked. The last rooms are fine. They are not the best ones.
The Turing Test is a smart game that trusts its own metaphor more than its own mechanics. It asks whether a machine can think, then quietly asks whether you would kill two people to keep an answer off Earth. The second question is the one that stays.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
