Any game attempting to ape Portal has one simple test to pass: Is it better than playing fan levels for Portal 2 for the same length of time? You'd think the test would be "is this game better than or on par with Portal 1 or 2?", but time has only shown just how pointless a question is when the answer is always "no". So instead I think it's fairer to compare to the fan content built in the actual skeleton of Portal. And honestly, the Turing Test fails that test entirely.

What's here is pretty weak honestly. The puzzles are adequate enough, but do nothing that hasn't been done a thousand times before. Many mechanics are cribbed directly from Portal with often no changes at all, such as weighted boxes and ligtbridges. The only time I found myself stuck for any amount of time was in one optional puzzle, the reward for which was so pointless that I almost wished I hadn't bothered. The big issue with the Turing Test is it has too many mechanics, and none of them are fleshed out or interesting enough to be considered central. The game consistently introduces new puzzle tools every few levels right to its very end, meaning that most of the puzzles feel like tutorials rather than genuine headscratchers.

But the puzzles aren't awful. They're passable, on the level of your fairly mindless newspaper faire, with some lateral thinking occasionally required. What of the story then? Sadly, it's no better. A nonsensical sandwich of exposition philosophy 101 thought experiments humorlessly discussed with a dull AI. All building up to a final moral quandary that feels like someone thought the trolley problem was too balanced and needed to be easier.

Again, I want to say I don't hate the Turing Test, it's a decent enough first effort, but it's copying its homework from one of the best games of all time and as a result fails to bring anything interesting to the table. Play any other Portal clone, or hell, just replay Portal for the fiftieth time and ignore the Turing Test.

log 1 -- made the inexplicable decision to finally pick The Witness back up again while browsing my library on the steam deck. blew through way more than i had ever gotten to before in one day--what felt like most of the main island's puzzle sections (up to the mountain). genuinely maybe 8 hours. i don't know why i got that locked in. maybe i'll shelve this again, because i haven't gotten a lot out of the game so far that i hadn't already by playing before, or by listening to other people talk about the game, but for the sake of scratching the gestalt itch i'll probably finish the game, even if by largely referring to a guide for time.
log 2 -- finished the main goal of the game, largely cheating with guides. didn't feel satisfied and ended up continuing for another too-many-hours to fill out many of the optional puzzles i missed. i know full well there isn't any sort of completion reward, but i wanted to do it. beating the randomly generated Challenge course was genuinely rewarding, and some of the secrets i "found" were pretty cool to see. as soon as an FMV scene began i had a flash of remembrance that i'd certainly been told about it before, so my reaction was an interesting blend of appreciation and detachment. while i update this log, i'm waiting for the eclipsed moon to finish it's hour-long path so i can get that notorious checkbox ticked. that's some fun synchronicity--that i felt somehow drawn to return to this game soon after an unusually much talked about total lunar eclipse across my part of the world.

A sequel that very much rings more hollow than the iconic first instalment in terms of its narrative, but makes up for it in spades with small but absolutely essential upgrades to the gameplay that leaves it a lesser, but still worthy follow-up.

Now, that's not to say that I consider the story in this game to be bad, by any stretch. The steps the narrative takes to follow on from the first game is to be commended - my issues lie in the style of which this second outing is presented. The comic book cutscenes remain, but the writing comes across as less snappy - the metaphors are heavily toned down and James McCaffrey's line reads are far dryer, with less of the biting cynicism and more of a cold emptiness. In-game cutscenes are animated in better quality, but lose the pseudo-cinematic direction of the original. Most of all, the story itself is a deeply personal one, to Max himself, rather than the conspiracies of the original he found himself tangled up in - no longer as much of a throwback to the noir crime dramas the original game was a loving homage to.

To put it simply, this felt like a sequel that was never expected to happen, and becomes something different. But that's not to say different is bad.

While the story still remains interesting - certain odd choices and flashbacks/flashforwards aside - it's the gameplay that forms the star attraction this time around, and just as well, because Remedy brought their A-game. Movement feels much smoother (aside from the weird jumping that brings you to a dead stop mid-air like a cartoon character, not sure what's up with that), the shooting is more responsive, the quicksave adaptive difficulty bug brings enemy reflexes and accuracy back down to sane levels. Bullet time is also overhauled, making it less about dodging the slowed-down bullets and more about landing more shots before the goons can fire back, and the bullet-dodge is finally not mapped to the same button as regular bullet time, a big problem from 1. You even get a very cool spin-around fast reload animation, to further incentivise usage.

With all of 1's worst elements addressed and fixed, 2 does not stop there - ragdoll and physics objects are implemented throughout and Remedy have a lot of fun with how they're presented. Certain enemies get a special slow-mo killcam as their body violently descends off of a sheer drop, hitting multiple objects on their way down or landing in a trashcan. The physics objects are mainly just there to look cool, but holy shit for a 2003 game, they blew me away. Little pieces of debris from an explosion slowly falling over as you nudge them really adds so much to so many setpieces, but Remedy wisely stop short of making them any kind of important gameplay mechanic - I mean, this was post-Trespasser and pre-Half Life 2, so I guess that makes a lot of sense.

Level design is far more enjoyable than 1, with surprisingly large-scale areas to engage in combat in, and a lot of entertaining side details to explore or ignore at your leisure. Guard conversations, unread answer machine messages that add extra story details and those random TV shows that have become Remedy tradition from what I've heard. The AI is also very well-made, aggressively chasing the player when you take cover, diving for cover when being shot at themselves, and lobbing grenades and/or molotovs; although their aim is a little haphazard.

My major complaint, if I have to be honest, is the difficulty; I feel like I breezed through the first chapter, and it's to be expected due to one baffling decision: forcing the first playthrough to be on Easy. I don't know if they were afraid of game journalists or something, but whatever the case the game sadly bombed in terms of sales anyway, putting the series on the back burner for a good long time until Rockstar went it alone with Max Payne 3: although given the story in 2, perhaps it would have been better had the series moved on peacefully. I'll just have to see what it brings to the table once I've played it.

So, at the end of the day, the story? I think it's a little worse. The gameplay? Much, much better. Absolute must for third-person shooter fans, or honestly just videogame enjoyers in general.

There are many words that make me think of Code Veronica, and they are: tedious, ugly, charmless, crap, poop, pee, piss, ass, fart, crap (again), and steve.

For years the only way this game has occupied my memory is with the admittedly pretty clever metal detector puzzle, that actually has great tension and payoff to it. Much to my surprise, the actual game is so putrid, so unlikable, so regularly irritating that I can't even say I like it due to it sharing the same disc space as the rest of Code Veronica.

In an act that has baffled many scholars for years, this was considered a particularly GOOD game for a long time. There's a famous 7.0 review of Silent Hill 2 making the rounds right now where Code Veronica is rated HIGHER than it. I don't like to cast wide nets about people's personalities based on what they rate games, but maybe your soul is unclean and heaven's gates will reject you if you believe that.

A fully 3D entry, you might be surprised to see them utilize the third dimension for some truly lifeless, ugly as sin environments that didn't look good AT the time. Silent Hill 1 has more art and beauty than this game, because I guess actual artists worked on it and had ideas, when Code Veronica only had ideas for Steve and the Ashford Twins. The Ashford Twins are such an antiquated and terrible idea on the face of it that I don't even want to discuss them, but fucking Steve. OH I can talk about Steve.

He might be the perfect embodiment of Code Veronica, he fits so perfectly in this game by being so irritating and such a clearly bad idea that in the grand scheme of this game it makes PERFECT sense why he is here. Did they even try to make him likeable? I know his english voice is so famously terrible, so incredibly bad that it is beyond belief, but could you ever actually like this annoying brat even in the japanese dub? If there is an undub, I've never played it, and if there is, I'm not playing THIS game ever again. This one is very firmly going on "Hated Of All Time" piles. This game just flat sucks, it could have had the fucking Soul Reaver voice cast and the gameplay would still be just straight Not Fun.

For the record, I understand why this game has been skipped for a remake: it is so bereft of any good ideas you'd have to essentially make a BRAND new game in its place, there is NOTHING here worth revisiting.