Day Three
- Game: Tesla Effect: A Tex Murphy Adventure
- Source: Humble Jumbo Bundle 3
- Started: 03/12
Confession time: I've never played a Tex Murphy game, at least before today. I dropped out of adventure games around the advent of FMV and needing multiple CDs per game, and even though the Tex Murphy series are generally regarded as some of the few good ones (though perhaps still stricken with the same abstruseness that briefly put the adventure game genre on ice), I've never gone back to check them out. I actually bought the whole set in a GOG sale some months back, so it's perhaps sheer bone-idleness. Anyway, the point of this pre-amble is to say that Tesla Effect seems very much a game built to appease its pre-existing fanbase, which has lead to some bemusement on my part as a Murphy neophyte.
In a sense, the statement that the game is made specifically for current Tex Murphy fans is literally true, being the result of a successful Kickstarter driven by deeply nostalgic crowd. The game itself makes numerous references to both the Kickstarter campaign that allowed it to exist (though in the usual peripheral metaphorical way, such as a set of mugshots in a burned down building) and Tex's many past adventures, as he'll occasionally find some artifact from a previous game and have it switch to a "flashback" mode that plays back that game's FMV in as high a quality as the developers can manage from the source footage. Even without the direct flashbacks, many of the game's legacy characters make a return, and there's plenty of references to their shared history with Tex.
In a sense, this is both exclusionary and cozy. The world feels lived in, its characters having been developed through multiple adventures and appear in this game fully formed. Tex Murphy's actor Chris Jones, who is also the series' long-time director and formerly of Access Games, has an easy familiarity with the role and its tonal swings from serious noir gumshoe to goofy, pratfalling adventure game hero. It sort of feels like coming to a TV show several seasons in, when you can appreciate how it now runs like a well-oiled machine but sort of wish you could go back to its awkward early days just to be there on the ground floor. Something I fully intend to do with Tex Murphy as soon as I've completed this new one.
Beyond that, I'll have more to say about the game once I've seen it to its conclusion, hopefully tomorrow. For right now, that I'm actually eager to see more of it should be proof enough that I think it's pretty great so far. Sharp and funny script, well acted (for an FMV game) by a cast of actors and mostly actors fine with being dolled up in absurd prosthetics, never too perplexing and even has a collectible side-quest. I love those!
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