![]() ![]() You watch: everyone will be dressing like that in 30 years time. This guy isn’t mysterious, weird, or threatening at all. Probably down to financing, but a little sad. A lot of the deaths just instantly cut to the graveyard cutscene and give a stock response, rather than having an amusing FMV death scene and a unique “why the hell did you try to hug the electric fence” voice-over. There are a few pretty obvious continuity errors with the plot, a section where I magically received an item because I’d somehow avoided the cutscene where I was supposed to be given it, iffy sound levels, and a bunch of other niggling little problems. So, yes, that required reloading an even older save. One logic puzzle was bizarrely offset so that the correct solution wasn’t actually the correct solution until I reloaded a save, and this same puzzle also had the problem that – on reloading said save – the statues I was supposed to be shuffling around were completely out of sync with where they were supposed to be. ![]() Putting aside the giant bloody spiders for one moment, there are a couple of gamestoppers within. Playing on Casual mode (which is highly recommended) has your flashlight beam sparkle on objects you can take, but the size of the rooms, the size of some of these objects, and the fact that white sparkles don’t show up particularly well under white light means this is less help than you might think.Īnd then there’s the bugs, and the occasional sections where a lack of polish is far more obvious than the objects you’re trying to find. I’ve never liked hidden object games, so I do not find this fun. There’s a bit where you’re hunting for baseball cards, and another section where you’re trying to find a bunch of pieces of a symbol that have been broken up and hidden. Excluding the fact that finding items you can take in these gargantuan areas can occasionally be incredibly painful, the game goes so far as to force you to scour areas for nine pieces of whatever before you can use it to solve a puzzle. The big issue, though? The big issue is that Tesla Effect regularly resembles a sodding hidden object game. That said, a few areas do manage to be quite genuinely creepy. There are a few really nice areas and sites – mostly down to a few bits of really nice art direction – but it’s not exactly a looker. The few characters you do see outside of live-action sequences aren’t exactly wonderfully rendered graphically speaking, Tesla Effect could probably have been made in the Quake 2 engine, and that’s really not hyperbole. With an area as vast as this game’s rendition of Chandler Avenue (Tex’s local stomping ground), the palpable loneliness is kind of eerie. ![]() You can’t wander into the Brew & Stew and see Louie behind the counter – you just click on the door, and you’re instantly in an FMV conversation. This leads to a slightly bizarre feeling that the world is entirely empty, because with one or two exceptions you will almost never see another living thing in the world around you. While the world itself is computer generated, any conversations you have are with real live actors playing the roles. The story itself is told through gratifyingly cheesy live-action sequences. With that in mind, it’s time to figure out what happened over the past seven years, if Chelsee is still alive, what role he played in the shootout that apparently took place just as he was knocked unconscious, and what Nikola Tesla has to do with everything. The last thing he can remember is him and his sort-of girlfriend Chelsee Bando getting into a stranger’s car, and then both of them being shot. Instead, he wakes up with a scar on his head, no memory of the past seven years, and all of his old friends telling him that he turned into a total bastard. Unlike most of Tex’s earlier adventures, Tesla Effect doesn’t open with a simple-looking case that turns out to be so much more. This was as surprising in 1994 as it is now. Yes, I know: they were FMV heavy adventures and they were actually good. The Tex Murphy titles are first-person FMV adventures set in a post-apocalyptic San Francisco, in which you take the role of – can you guess? – Tex Murphy, a sarcastic and ineffectual trenchcoated private investigator with a deep desire to be Philip Marlowe and a habit of getting involved in apocalyptic schemes. Tesla Effect is the first Tex Murphy game since 1998’s Overseer. ![]()
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