Reader reviews for Tesla Effect: A Tex Murphy Adventure

A lot of things are very good in this game : story, atmosphere, FMV sucking you in like a movie, humor, characters, etc, all of these would make for a great game.

But I was very disappointed in the puzzles : the off-game ones (special screens) are very easy and are nothing new, and the in-game ones (inventory things) are not hard either. Actually, the only times I found myself stuck were because I missed something just laying on the floor somewhere, wihtout any other indication. This is 3d “pixel hunting”, and that’s the worst annoyment an adventure game can provide. So you begin to thoroughly search every place you get in and that’s no fun.

Too bad, it had everything to draw you in, and it does for a few hours, before the gaming itself becomes boring and draws you out.

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Time Played: 10-20 hours
Difficulty: Easy

The Tesla Effect excels technically, but is otherwise poor. The gameplay is a soulless rendition of what made the previous games great, and the padding thrown in doesn’t help this poor impression.

First of all, the game suffers from serious pacing issues. It’s divided into “days” which aren’t days, and which length differs wildly, up to a “day” where you do almost nothing.
This is not just a nitpick, as the plot also advances in a confusing, uneven manner. While dialogues are decently written, the overall plot design is poor. Instead of gradually learning new details and incorporating them into the picture of the plot you’re forming in your head, characters just puke out a random twist at you. It’s less like filling in a crossword puzzle and more like reading one of those stories where different people tack on more and more sentences to see what comes out.

Gameplay is severely lacking. The points mechanism is poorly implemented and seems tacked on. Most characters don’t really have much to say about anything, so you end up interrogating them mechanically just to rack up points. Some characters you can’t re-visit, and most you don’t really have a reason to.

There is constant hand-holding. The game keeps telling you what to do, and forces you to do it in the right order. For instance, you start out with several questions to investigate. Tex suggested I tackle one, but I wanted to investigate the other. Alas, some obstacle was in my way, which arbitrarily disappeared later on once I did what Tex wanted.
The inventory puzzles are trivial, and the stand-alone ones are usually just copied from elsewhere, such as yet another river crossing puzzle. No insight is required to solve any of them - if you need a code, it’s a matter of finding where the code is.
There are several sections that feel like a hidden-object game, and are clearly thrown in as padding. Even the game’s version of hotspot highlighting was powerless against those damned baseball cards. Heck, there’s even a maze in there.
There are some poorly-implemented stealth sections. Previous games had them, but you had line-of-sight advantage over the guards/drones, so they had some logic to them. This time, a guard rounds the corner, you lose, try over.
The final puzzle is panned in every review of this game, and rightfully so. It requires dexterity, and is in itself just anti-climactic. It’s ridiculous to imagine the hard-boiled detective rapidly fidgeting with dials to save the world.

All in all, the game is very disappointing. It plays like it was designed by a checklist, so they threw in everything a fan would want, without giving any consideration to how the parts mesh together. The technical excellence can’t make up for all of the gameplay and writing flaws.

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Time Played: 5-10 hours

If this game had been released 15 years ago it would have been great. But times have changed and it is reasonable to expect more from games nowadays. More puzzles that do not involve exhausting every line of dialog for example. The worst part however is the 3D graphics which look like something out of the N64 era. This is particularly disappointing since there are 3D cutscenes which have high production values only to then be dropped into the real-time world and suffer through the poor quality there.

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Time Played: 2-5 hours