Can machines think? This is the question posed by Alan Turing's 1950 paper, Computer Machinery and Intelligence. Turing believed that by the year 2000, our understanding of computers would have evolved to the point where machines could think, work out problems, and be able to imitate a human. As of today, Turing's predictions might not have all come true, but humans are sometimes duped in small ways every day, not least through the many online chat and help bots that make you think you're talking to a human.

What does it mean to be human in a world in which machines can imitate humans? Where does the human component begin and end? What does the human component even consist of? Bulkhead Interactive's The Turing Test explores these questions.

At its core, The Turing Test is a first-person puzzle game in which you explore a research base on Europa, a moon of Jupiter. The puzzles are supposedly designed in such a way so as to make them impossible for a computer to solve. Only a human mind can unlock the puzzles, thus setting up a potential answer for the riddle of what it means to be human.

"As we were near the end of making Pneuma [the studio's first puzzle game] we did want more time to polish it, but we had no money and needed to get the game out and into people's hands," Howard Philpott, creative producer at Bulkhead, explains to me. "The gameplay curve we had in Pneuma was okay at teaching you certain mechanics at the start, but at the end we had different mechanics, and it didn't teach you those through the gameplay. A lot of the time you were testing things out through trial and error."

"We've had more time with The Turing Test to work on these things, though," continues Philpott. "It's been about a year of full-on development and six months of pre-production where we were creating puzzles and defining this curve."

















Philpott believes that The Turing Test, due for release on PC and Xbox One this August, is now at a stage where players are able to pick up the controller and learn how the game works without the need for tutorial tests and texts. The reference point he brings up a number of times during our conversation is Croteam's excellent The Talos Principle, in that "in every puzzle we introduce something new, so it progresses with you as you play."

Puzzles revolve around distributing power, which takes various forms, with a view to unlocking doors. An early example of a puzzle involves placing power boxes into sockets and shooting a single orb of power from a gun into other sockets located across a room. Another example sees you having to work your way through a square room, each wall beset with its own door. The conceit is that you don't have enough power to open all of the doors, forcing you to figure out how to keep a specific door open in order to shoot power into the sockets that lie beyond them.

It's a similar setup to early Talos Principle levels where you must work out how to overcome multiple barriers, despite it seeming as though you don't have enough resources to do so.