Tesla Effect: A Tex Murphy Adventure

 

Tesla Effect: A Tex Murphy Adventure

Type	Detective adventure
Single or multiplayer	Singleplayer
Developer	Big Finish Games
Publisher	Atlus
Fun	3/5
Difficulty	4/5

Tesla Effect is a game which is very hard to describe, but only when you play it for longer. On the outside, it is a 3D first person adventure where you collect items and solve puzzles, intertwined with full motion video cutscenes. But on the inside, it is a combination of many things, some wonderful, some not so great.

To begin with, this game is the sixth in line of Tex Murphy games. Seeing as how the last one came out in 1998, I didn’t get the chance to play it, so this review will focus on the game that came out in 2014, as if it were a standalone game.

However, even though there is more than 15 years between the two games, the Tesla Effect looks like something that came out in the early 2000’s. The 3D surroundings, modeled in Unity, reminded me of the earliest first person games I used to play a long time ago, with the corners stretching as the camera turns around. There is no HUD, you can’t see your feet, everything is very simple and, one might say, primitive, graphics-wise.

On the other hand, there are the cutscenes. Again, they are done in full motion video with actors and green screens, which is a technique I saw in video games many, many years ago. Surprisingly, this all works somehow. If you get over the initial shock that you are playing a modern game which feels like it’s 20 years older, you’ll get fun out of it.

The actors did their job well, if their job was to be as cheesy and over the top overacting as possible. Some of them were actually not that bad, some were downright annoying, but most of them were fun and colorful. I don’t think there is more than one character that doesn’t have a quirk, physical or verbal, sometimes both. Everything is so obviously cheap, trying to fall into the not-so-easy-to-fall-into category of "so bad it's good". Sometimes it manages to do it, other times not really.

The main character, who I hadn’t had the opportunity to meet in earlier games, left a good impression on me. In the beginning, he was cocky and annoying, until I realized the absurdity and intentional cheapness the authors had in mind. He is a mix of Guybrush Threepwood, Max Payne and Humphrey Bogart, and by the end, I grew to like him.

The gameplay, like I said, is fairly simple. You go from location to location and solve puzzles. Rarely, they are inventory type, most of the time they are logical. Some of them will really make you scratch your head, and none are too easy. The levels are varied, from a seedy street in old San Francisco, to a beach house, and an island power plant, all set in a futuristic Blade Runner background. At times, it reminded me of other games I played a long time ago, like System Shock 2 or Half Life. I didn’t like this deviation from the standard detective storyline, but it was a nice change of pace.

The story, in my opinion, tries to be too much at the same time. The Tesla Effect from the title is not really well explained, and is only a plot device much later in the end of the game. The storyline deviates from a noire detective story, to a sort of horror, to a grand conspiracy theory. Some characters have storylines that are not completely resolved, and some are only there for a scene or two before going back into non-existence.

In the end, I have to say that my opinion of this game went up the more I played it, but never really reached the “amazing” levels. Some parts were great, and I would recommend playing the game just for them. If you miss the old school games, when 3D was first starting to get wide use, play the Tesla Effect, and take on the role of Tex Murphy, a crime fighting vigilante who is tossed in the middle of a large world-changing conspiracy, and save the world.