In today’s world, where AI has fully saturated into every aspect of our lives — whether we like it or not — the question of the Turing Test seems almost quaint. Can a human identify a machine through a text conversation, or will the AI inevitably reveal itself as a cold, soulless creation? Qualia, a free-to-play narrative game that launched in March, poses a much more interesting question: could you pass the Turing Test?
In Qualia, the player takes the role of a participant in an Intellica-brand study, where they are presented with two statements. From there, they must decide whether the statement was written by a human or an AI. It’s a simple test, but things become strange when the Intellica system reads your results and begins to quiz you in turn.
It’s a really nice, understated piece of analog horror. There was one scare that was spoiled by the fact that it used a very familiar stock image that I recognized from Home Safety Hotline and the Canva premium gallery, but there are also some thought-provoking and interesting scenarios to read through. Qualia only takes about 15 minutes to play through, but there are six endings, and if you want to find all of them it’ll likely take you somewhere in the neighborhood of an hour. For free ninety-nine, that’s not bad at all.
There’s a concerted effort to shove AI into every aspect of our lives through avenues like Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, and ChatGPT: a whole gaggle of generative AI companions forced onto our screens and devices. Qualia doesn’t have the time or bandwidth to dive into the full impact of AI on society, and it’s all the better for having a narrow focus on one particularly uncomfortable experience.
The developer CMY2K is working on more Qualia content; there’s a product on Steam marked as a DLC and titled “Intellica New Employee Welcome Packet”. We’ll have to wait to see how deep the rabbit hole of this particular mystery goes, and how it ties into the Intellica corporation, but for now it’s worth giving this test a spin and seeing whether you can crack the code.
