Played: Tesla Effect: A Tex Murphy Adventure
The first thing to note about this game isn’t even a question of quality - it’s how unusual a game like this is. There are two games here - a first-person environment exploration game, complete with object puzzles and some completely bizarre (and unneeded) stealth gameplay, and a series of navigable cutscenes where the characters are played by actors - not through motion capture, but as their real-life selves. How they come together is… well. It’s something.
The FMV aspect (that’s full motion video, the term ascribed to the earlier iterations of the technology back in the 90s) is where the game really shines - Tex Murphy (played by Chris Jones) is a very fun character, full of puns and Dad jokes. (A brief aside: Chris Jones actually looks a little bit like my Dad, if you took my Dad’s features and pulled them out of his face a bit more. This meant - for me - that the aforementioned jokes worked more than they probably should have done.) Most of the characters are campy and ridiculous enough to fit the genre, though there’s one noticeable moment where your digital assistant (nicknamed Smart Alex and played by one of the MST3K guys) makes a comment that reeks of transphobia about a character who, while not quite offensive in the things they say, definitely has their gender expression (or identity, it’s left unclear as to which) played for laughs. Mercifully, it’s a minor moment, and most of the game just backs away from questions of gender politics (or, honestly, any serious issues).
The dialogue system is a little strange, especially given that it affects a lot of the way the exposition unfolds; rather than explicit lines, you’re given vague descriptors (like “optimistic”, “pessimistic”, “play it straight” and so on) that sometimes feel divorced from the things that actually come out of Tex’s mouth. It’s testament to the snappy writing how much this doesn’t actually matter, though - during these scenes, you really just feel like you’re along for the ride, and any semblance of interactivity is just an added bonus.
Things are more of a mixed bag when it does come to the interactive elements. Tesla Effect, in opposition to the previous Tex Murphy games, features several large open environments to explore, and there are plenty of puzzles to solve by interacting with them. Sometimes, these were great fun, and played very intuitively, particularly towards the end. At its best, Tesla Effect nails that sweet spot between scratching your head and just feeling like you’re going through the motions, where the puzzles feel like an achievement but not a monumental task. At other times, things were more complex.
Those moments of sheer complexity can be separated into two camps - the puzzles that were clearly meant to pose a challenge, and the puzzles that were a victim of bad level design. One example of the former would be a puzzle where you’re supposed to move a number of pieces around a board to produce a particular pattern, where it is solvable but requires a pen and paper to figure out. Of the latter, there’s a sequence in a swamp (part of the demo, in fact) where you have to find five planks to build a ladder, and I spent half a fucking hour trying to find the last one, only to find that it was hidden in a bush that you could only see from one specific angle. At times like this, I started to get a headache and the game wasn’t fun anymore, especially as Tex kept saying the same lines over and over as I failed to move to the next step. Thankfully, moments like this were few and far between, and there’s little that can’t be helped along by the hint system. It does, however, cast into doubt the harder difficulty (there are two: “Casual” and “Gamer”), which removes object highlights and hints, two things that become essential to getting anywhere in the game.
All in all, it’s worth playing simply because it’s quite unlike any other game out there. It’s a far cry from perfect, but there are enough dramatic beats and fantastic one-liners (and a killer soundtrack) that it makes it all excusable. I’m not quite ready to say that it merits resuscitating the FMV genre, but at the very least it’s a decent swansong.