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Tied to the Rails, July 27, 2013This is a game that is centrally about trolley-cases: ethical scenarios with binary options, designed to get at the heart of a problem of ethics. Rather than circling around a single issue, it aims to give a survey of an entire landscape; as philosophy IF goes, this is an approach closer to The Chinese Room than De Baron. The difference is that where The Chinese Room presents its material as a goofy wonderland, The Test makes some effort to present each scenario with a degree of serious realism. I've written elsewhere about Test's shortcomings as a philosophical piece, so I won't harp any further on that subject.
As a work of participatory narrative, however, it's also a bit disappointing. The premise makes it very clear that every scene will boil down to a single binary choice; as in CYOA, this can easily lead to disengagement from the rest of the material, particularly when the material is intellectually or emotionally challenging (which trolley-cases damn well should be). The fact that the scenes are obviously unrelated one-off scenarios also makes engagement more difficult: it's easier to take a decision seriously when you expect to have to live with the consequences for a while. The game aims to create realist, flesh-and-blood characters, thus lending more weight to its scenarios; but it's hard to develop a sense of attachment to a character when you're aware that they exist for a single purpose and will be discarded once that purpose is complete.
Finally, the ending, in which it transpires that (Spoiler - click to show)the protagonist is an artificial intelligence being evaluated for ethical attitudes, is too brief to be satisfying, and feels like a cheap narrative justification for a hodge-podge structure. To be really interesting, it'd have to explore things considerably further - what sort of world has a need for robots with a varied range of ethics? what sorts of things would result from following the ethical compass you've defined? how do these values conflict or cohere?
Given its design premises, Test is competently executed; but those premises make it prohibitively difficult to accomplish its goals.