.T.E.S.T: Expected Behaviour — Sci-Fi 3D Puzzle Quest Reviews

The game does not support key (re)mapping. If you are using or used to AZERTY, you are not their audience. They wrote somewhere it was to avoid spoilers. They could at least provide AZERTY and QUERTY mapping preconfigured ? So, you if have an AZERTY keyboard, just pass on until it is fixed.

This is (not) the Antichamber. It is failing to that small spectre of games, in which you should use "cheating" (like old-good climbing on wall polygons via spaces, looking through textures, etc.). But it's not that simple. Just means that you may use every single opportunity which you can imagine to pass through. And that "cheating" for me is a base for gameplay. It is almost filling me with that desperation feeling and nasty taste after overcoming it like in "Portal: Prelude" and "Antichamber". Although, it lacks Antichamber's state of mind change and gameplay techniques are feeding pretty fast for appropriate consumption.

I'm not a big fan of puzzle games, but this one is the best puzzle game I've ever played. It has many different game mechanics on which puzzles are build, so you can enjoy a variety of solutions on different levels. Some of them are fairly simple, but the rest can make you think hard. And even more puzzles will be added soon! Also there are nice graphics and thought-out plot. I hope the developers will continue to please us with their creations.

If you like first person puzzle games, I highly recommend this one. The puzzles are challenging, yet not overly complicated and I enjoyed figuring them out on my own (except for a handful of the advanced lift puzzles, see below). This game has some unique mechanics including time-manipulation that allows you to make a certain jump or throw very accurately or retry them without having to restart a level per se. I also really enjoyed the plot if you want to call it that. Most levels start with you overhearing the mysterious testers talk about you and the puzzles, which functions as minor hints to solving the puzzle. If you like the way GLaDOS berates you in Portal you'll like this aspect, too. My only critique is that I found 3 or 4 of the harder lift puzzles too tedious. While there's often multiple ways to solve the puzzles, these ones require pressing buttons in a particular order at the exact right time and have very narrow margins for error where a fraction of second makes all the difference. Other than that, it was very enjoyable and well worth the price!

I'm completing Steam games in alphabetical order, and you can watch my review here: https://youtu.be/ZQUDsq2Rt10 Prefer to read? .T.E.S.T: is a first-person puzzle platformer in a similar vein to games like Portal or Antichamber, and uses a variety of mechanics including lifts, clones, coloured keys and gates, and time manipulation. All of the elements of a great game are here, and are individually quite clever, but are never combined in a way that really brings everything together into something greater than the sum of its parts, which is a shame. If first person puzzle-platformers are your jam you'll likely enjoy this, and even if not, I think it's worth a look as the devs clearly put quite a bit of effort into this. It's not perfect, but there's a handful of clever moments.

I don't often give negative reviews for games, mostly because there is an important distinction between "I don't like this game" and "this game is bad". I won't say this game is [i]bad[/i], but it's definitely [b]not[/b] what it claims to be, which is a puzzle game. The game starts off with an intro sequence of a man (you) being abducted by aliens. You can overhear (and for no explainable reason, understand) two (presumable) aliens talking about you; the gist of it seems to be that this is supposed to be some sort of test to prove that humans are intelligent. (Never mind the fact that the abductee was driving a motor vehicle on a paved road, which would be an impressive feat if our species lacked the problem-solving abilities they seem to be testing for.) None of the rules of the puzzles are explained explicitly, except through hints that can be gleaned from the aforementioned overheard conversations between the two aliens. I don't see this as a problem -- in fact, it can be a hallmark of an excellent puzzle game; consider Myst, The Witness, and The Talos Principle -- all three dump you into their respective worlds without any explanation of what to do next, and it's on you to figure it out. Additionally, for some reason, the aliens have transplanted your brain/mind into some sort of robot body which is capable of doing things that human beings can't normally do. Several of the tutorial puzzles are meant to teach the player about these capabilities. Several of the early puzzles in .T.E.S.T. are even actual puzzles (most of the earliest puzzles are simply tutorials to demonstrate game mechanics), but the game soon gives way to things that I absolutely do not consider to be "puzzles", any more than the questions in my high school physics homework were "puzzles". I will elaborate on three particular puzzles that I feel demonstrate the "non-puzzle" nature of most of this game. [h1]Pool[/h1] (as in [i]billiards[/i], not [i]a place to swim[/i]) You are given two balls, and to clear the level, one must transport the red ball from one end of a bridge to the other. This would be straightforward, except you have to do this [i]without picking up the red ball[/i]; if you try to do so, you fail. You also can't move the red ball with your feet; you pass right through it. (But somehow you can stand on top of it. That mechanic isn't useful here.) The answer to this puzzle is that you must pick up the blue ball and throw it at the red ball to push it forward. However, you can't just push the red ball directly down the bridge. There are a bunch of barriers on the bridge, forcing you to move it in a zig-zag pattern. And if you throw the blue ball too hard and it pushes the red ball off of the bridge, you fail. (Also, if you don't catch the blue ball before it bounces and goes off of the bridge, you fail.) Failure here doesn't require restarting the whole thing; you can rewind to just before you made the throw and try it again. And again. And again. But again, this isn't solving a puzzle any more than calculating the force required to move an object was back in physics class. At least in physics, I knew the masses of the objects and the coefficients of friction and how to deliver the exact force required; here I have none of that, and no reasonable means to find out. I gave up on this one and went to do some other puzzles. [h1]Intersection[/h1] The "puzzle" aspect of this challenge is similar to that of "Pool". I need to get a red ball around a 90 degree turn. The solution to the puzzle is to the red ball exactly halfway down a corridor, so it lands in an intersection where I can hit it with a blue ball thrown down a crossing corridor, so I can pick up the red ball at the far end. If I don't throw the red ball hard enough, it doesn't land in the intersection and I have to try again. If I throw the red ball too hard, it doesn't land in the intersection and I have to try again. If I don't have the red ball land in a sweet spot of the intersection, then when I hit it with the blue ball, it won't go far enough and I won't be able to reach it and then I have to go all the way back to my throw of the red ball. Again: at least in high school physics, they gave me all the numbers -- mass, distance, coefficient of friction -- needed to compute how to make this happen. This one I actually solved. [h1]I forget the name of this one[h1] This is one of the "tutorial" puzzles, intended to teach the player about the "slow time" function (the V key). While V is held, the directional movement of all objects, including the player character, is dramatically slowed. What is evidently not slowed is rotational movement, because you can look around (and pick up objects) at full speed. The goal of this puzzle is to jump over a chasm and pick up three balls floating in the air near the apex of the jump, then carry them to the exit. It took several tries to time things so I had sufficient time to grab all three of them while they were within distance, but even after I had managed to pull that off consistently, I kept falling short of the jump. I still don't know what I did differently that actually let me land on the far side. [h1]Conclusion[/h1] There are definitely some puzzles here, but the ones I've seen were extremely simplistic. All of the difficulty I actually encountered was in correctly guessing the correct angle, distance, and thrust force required to execute the solution. The existence of the "rewind" game makes the game's unreasonable demands more bearable, but it doesn't make them reasonable -- or fun.

This is an awesome puzzle game. It is easily one of the better first person puzzle games out there. This game has tons of levels and the difficulty of these levels ranges from easy to brutally hard. Some of the levels took me more than an hour to complete. A few took me around two hours to complete. You have to endure this difficulty and be patient to be able to finish this game. There are a few levels in this game which you will probably hate because they require very tedious actions or high precision. It is a good thing there is a rewind button because you will be using it a lot. Most of the levels are fun to solve. The levels are diverse and very creative. There is a story in the game but it is very thin. Only the intro and the end movie told the story. I succeeded in finishing all the levels except one very small level called ‘up’. Luckily that level was not mandatory to finish the game. I had great fun playing this game and finishing all the levels. I highly recommend this game to serious puzzle lovers.

Devs chose to use Unity. Unity doesn't provide a way to remap controls, and the devs did not implement their own. Disappointing, as the very small amount of the tutorial that you can play before you see the WASD prompt is intriguing. UPDATE: Devs made a deliberate design choice to not include any way to remap controls to "avoid spoilers". Fair enough. The choice to not allow remapping is yours, and the choice to recommend against the game is mine.

I liked half of the game. I'm a first person puzzle lover who will put up with the worst of them, but this one is more frustrating than most because of trial and error puzzles. It's rare that I leave a game unfinished, but this one isn't fun, it's tideous and too spread out.

Half the game is fun. The other half is an exercise in frustration - a puzzle game that requires a high-precision mouse, twitch timing, and constant trial and error of "what angle do I need to throw this ball at". If you don't mind leaving a game half finished, then get it and just stop when you get to the annoying mechanics.