.T.E.S.T: Expected Behaviour — Sci-Fi 3D Puzzle Quest
.T.E.S.T: Expected Behavior is a 3D first-person brain twister in a sci-fi setting. Solve puzzles to test your logic, think outside the box, act fast and use your skills to adapt to unfamiliar situations.
.T.E.S.T is full of both new and classic mechanics, but they are so deep that some still aren’t fully revealed. The game will make this clear to you. Again and again you’ll see that each rule always has some additional nuance. This can keep going forever. Keys, doors, moving platforms, even jumping will open up from a whole new angle.
You’ll be faced with:
– 119 levels
– Time manipulations
– Curved space
– Player-controlled level structure changes
– Transfer of consciousness to another body
– Multiple game zones with unique mechanics
– Classic mechanics in a new form
– Non-linear level map
– Some puzzles are about exploring the game’s rules
– Logical puzzles
Plus, for what it’s worth, the fate of the human race is at stake. What exactly is happening to it – that’s just another riddle waiting to be unraveled. You’ll have to collect the facts one by one if you want to discover the truth.
Steam User 15
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.T.E.S.T is a well-made first person puzzler in the same spirit of Portal.
While that is a bit over simplified, it is a good place to start for describing this game. There are unique elements here too, especially the ability to manipulate time, transitioning your consciousness into another body, etc. These things are done really well and the game runs smoothly without any major difficulties.
The design of this game is a bit simplified as well compared to Portal, there are a lot of texture details that were left out, in favor of developing just the puzzle parts of this game.
The story starts as you are an individual who is driving home from work one day, and instead of arriving home, you are seemingly abducted by alients. They they put you to work in testing their experiments. You are basically the mouse in the maze, with different elements, and you need to find your way to the exit of each maze. Instead of being rewarded cheese, however, you are rewarded with yet more puzzles to solve.
There are two overhead/in your head voices that are talking among themselves, and for some reason you are able to understand them. This is very reminiscent of the AI in Portal as well. This is often fairly amusing, so I recommend that you read these dialogue texts...
The puzzles are unique, complex, and often difficult. There are many different puzzles, more than 100, and they are broken up into different categories that you can arrive at after solving some other puzzles. The way the game is set up is non-linear, in that you can open up different puzzles within the same group, while at the same time unlocking puzzles from other groups as well. So if you get stuck on on puzzle, you can skip it for now and move to a different one, deciding to come back to it later.
I think this is a good puzzle game for anyone who is a fan of the first=person puzzler genre. Its unique characteristics allows the player to experience some refreshing and new aspects attempted within this genre. Some of the levels are rather difficult, in my opinion, but then again, I often have trouble finding my legs and feet while playing a game from a first-person perspective. Especially when a puzzle is time sensitive in first person view, then I am really in trouble. Nevertheless, this is a good game and if you are at all interested, I would recommend it for sure.
I received the product for free. I did not receive any compensation to write this review. The opinions represented here are entirely my own and were not influenced in any way.
Steam User 16
T.E.S.T: Expected Behaviour:
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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.
Positives:
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+ Good Graphics
+ 120 Levels to complete (when fully released)
+ Easy to play but challenging
+ Good price point
+ Achievements
Negatives:
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- No trading cards as yet
A fun and challenging puzzle game. T.E.S.T your logic and expect to think outside the box.
7/10
Key provided by developer/publisher for review purposes. Any opinions expressed are entirely my own!
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Steam User 2
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!
Steam User 3
Worthy of much more attention. Easily in the Top-20 best first person puzzle games available on Steam, in my humble opinion.
Steam User 6
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.
Steam User 5
Looks very promising.
Controls are a little bit clunky, `high` settings will make game a little bit laggy.
But game's core is its mechanic. And it is perfect.
Steam User 3
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.