Day Four

• Game: Tesla Effect: A Tex Murphy Adventure
• Source: Humble Jumbo Bundle 3
• Started: 03/12
• Ended: 04/12

Phew, this one comes in right under the wire. Turns out, this game was a little bigger than I anticipated, though perhaps "bloated" is more the word. I'm afraid to say that my opinion on Tesla Effect has worsened now that I've played it all the way through to the end. It's still a great adventure game, and the scenes with FMV actors are as fun as they were from the offset, but the game suffers from a lot of weird pacing and scale problems past the first few chapters and seems to have carried over some of the excesses of the FMV generation.

Let's start with the pacing problems. Tesla Effect takes place in a few venues, one of which is Chandler Street: Tex's home and that of a bunch of colorful locals who usually have something piquant or sardonic to offer to the current mystery Tex is working on. This street, though it becomes very familiar as the game continues, is where the "asking NPCs questions" side of the game comes into focus, and for as largely empty as the street is it's fun to stroll around badgering the neighbors and collecting information. The other venues are, I suppose, what you'd call "instances" or "stages": self-contained areas of little narrative importance beyond the chapter you're currently playing (if you ever return to these places, it's usually just to talk to an NPC). There's usually one big puzzle to solve there, often involving a set of collectibles necessary to move on with the plot, and a bunch of secondary puzzles which usually lead to one of said collectibles. It's a tad formulaic, and some of the puzzles aren't quite as fun as they could be. Instead, we get the same bunch of Layton/Mensa also-rans that pop up frequently in any adventure game from the FMV generation onwards, some completely incongruous stealth and laser-dodging sequences (fortunately neither are particularly tough) and, though I hesitate to say anything about the finale, a difficult and excruciatingly precise timed puzzle to cap the game off. I sorely wish Tesla Effect could've played to its strengths more and focused on the NPC interrogations. Not with LA Noire's half-baked "human lie detector" routine, necessarily, but something akin to that perhaps. You know, detective stuff.

The scale of some of the areas, too, can be a bit of an issue at times. One of the late-game locations, a giant abandoned hi-tech facility, has about an acre of empty rooms, test chambers, reactors and an enormous atrium, but you're usually just solving one or two inventory puzzles per each of its four floors and were it not so gigantic you'd be done within fifteen minutes. As it is, the items and hotspots are so spread out that you're spending an hour simply exploring the place. Maybe it's verisimilitudinous for this facility to be big enough to house a hundred people, given that they bothered to install all these impressive fixtures and a nuclear reactor, but it's still a chore to sift through the dozens of rooms for collectible objects needed for a puzzle.

Speaking of which, I've got nothing against collectibles (quite the contrary, in fact) but the game seems to lean on item hunting a little too often. I very much recommend switching the difficulty to "casual": even if you don't intend to use the hints provided on this easier mode, the player's torch will generate a sparkling effect on any item in the environment the player can collect, even through drawers and cabinets the player can interact with. When it comes to finding tiny keys and other smaller objects lying in the dark, the feature is invaluable for saving time.

So Tesla Effect has its problems, on top of those inescapable ones that come with being an FMV game. Maybe dumb Mensa puzzles and silly action sequences were trademarks of the Tex Murphy franchise, I wouldn't know as a series novice, but they don't seem like a particularly good fit. I'd still recommend Tesla Effect though; I enjoyed its writing and acting, its near-future setting and crazy ideas, its charm and chutzpah, and... well, you simply just don't see this type of point and click adventure game around any more.

Maybe with good reason.

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