T.E.S.T: Expected Behaviour

Review

What I really enjoy about puzzle games is how much variety there is to choose from. In some adventure games you have to complete puzzles in order to move on to the next stage of the story, while in others, you have to go from point A to point B in a limited amount of time or limited number of moves. Well in T.E.S.T: Expected Behaviour, you’ll have to figure out puzzles in the first-person perspective. Some will be quick and easy and others will T.E.S.T your logic and make you think outside the box! How clever do you think you are?

T.E.S.T: Expected Behaviour is a 3D first-person puzzle game where you have to resolve 120 puzzles to beat the game. At the time of writing this review, the game is in early access and has 89 levels to play out of a total of 120.

The first 16 levels are pretty much a tutorial, and they are quick and easy to resolve. You will also learn a few tricks, such as stopping the time, fast forward and fast rewind. Slow motion will have to be earned later on in the game. In a nutshell, you have to figure out how to get access to a black block with a button on it (located somewhere within the level), and press the button in order to complete the stage.

There is plenty of variety in this game, with 13 different types of puzzles to play. To give you a couple of examples, in the key puzzles, you have to go through coloured walls to get access to another chamber. The interesting (and frustrating thing) is that you have three different coloured walls, and you must have a matching coloured key to enter.  However, you can only carry two different coloured keys at any given time. There are white pixelated walls that you can go through without a key, but once you enter, any keys you were carrying will be dropped and left in the chamber from which you came.  Some of these puzzles will make your brain smoke! Oh by the way, the keys are, in fact, coloured balls.  The Twins stages are with robots. In these puzzles you have to swap between two robots and work your way to the black block. The challenge here is that you can’t swap as you wish; the robots must be able to see each other, and it can be very tricky if there is a wall or bar in between them. The other thing which can be difficult is that they are on a moving platform; usually these platforms move quite rapidly and you might need to use slow motion or stop the time at the right moment and swap robots. And lucky you, some of the puzzles will have robots AND coloured walls to deal with! It’s very cleverly done. There will be exploration, slow motion, lift and other stages available in May 2018.

I really like the stage design of columns connected with laser beams. Each column represents a level and if you’ve already successfully resolved that level, a full white square will appear on the top of that column. If you only see the outline of the square at the top, it will mean that you either haven’t tried, or haven’t successfully beaten that level.

Graphically the game looks good and works well. In regards to the price point, this game is worth every cent, in my opinion.