Tesla Effect Review

One change I'm not so fond of – something that seems to be turning up in an awful lot of modern adventure games, but here's my chance to really whine about it – is that you have just two actions: 'look' and 'use'. 'Use' functions as an all-purpose button that automatically does whatever the most appropriate action is, whether it's picking up a small item, activating a mechanism, opening a container, pushing a crate or replacing a damaged hover-car manifold in the snow using only your toes (spoiler: that doesn't actually happen), and I find that this puts something of a disappointing limitation on the complexity of the puzzles. Sure, it's more streamlined, but part of the beauty of point-and-click adventures – and, more so, the graphical text parser adventures that preceded them – was that they required you to express exactly what you wanted to do, which 'use' negates. What do you mean, 'use' this item? Should I push it? Pull it? Steal it? Wear it as a hat? Oh, it opens it. I'm glad that Tex possessed the necessary psychic intuition to just know that's what he needed to do, but I can't help but feel that part of the puzzle here is just being done for me. It's even possible to just run around clicking on every interactive element in sight, brute-forcing large chunks of the puzzles as a result. Try 'use' in an old text adventure and watch it acknowledge your input just long enough to spit in your eye in disgust.

Also, while the adventure game puzzles themselves are usually fairly intuitive (take a look, Ether One), every now and then Tesla Effect resorts to what I like to call 'action game' puzzles: a catalogue of generic puzzles that can be easily slotted into any action game, bringing the pacing to a halt like a dead kangaroo on an unlit country road. It doesn't matter if they're 'Simon Says', sliding some blocks, reflecting a beam of light or just finding a bunch of arbitrarily placed switches (I have “two more to go, one more to go, sequence completed” permanently burned into the inside of my eyelids), they're all unimaginative and utterly contrived. At one point there I encountered a particularly obnoxious tile-sliding puzzle – sitting above a mantelpiece, because videogame logic – which would, when solved, reveal a code on its surface. Out of interest I looked up the most effective method of solving it, and apparently the only real way is brute force and patience. Brute force, you say? Would that be the kind of method involving the screenshot button and several minutes in Photoshop?

Goodness me, what am I thinking? Is this a bloody FMV game or what? Yes, yes, yes, but the fundamental problem with FMV is that it is only understood in terms of the mysterious eldritch language of film-making; of lights, cameras, actors, costumes, cues and green-screens. As somebody who wouldn't know a jump-cut if it leapt out of a hedge and tweaked my nose with a set of pliers, what meaningful comment can I really offer here? Chris Jones returns to the role of Tex, a little bit worn by the turn of the century but no less deadpan, and the rest of the cast is well-acted enough to stay believable. Costumes and special effects can occasionally look a bit low-budget, but I find that gives them a certain modicum of amateurish charm not unlike that of an old Doctor Who episode. Of course, the real star of the cutscenes here is the green-screen, and barring one or two rough spots I have to say that it performs admirably when blurring the line between people and polygons. Being an FMV game means that some of the cutscenes drag on a bit, but once again a modern amenity – the revered 'skip' button – is on-hand to soften the blow.

It'd just be nice if I had any other meaningful control over them. Let's just get this out of the way, shall we? The dialogue tree system is like coming to the end of a long, gruelling calculus exam, only to find a multiple choice question comprising fifty percent of your mark written entirely in Klingon. Then a polar bear savages you when you choose wrongly, just for good measure. The idea is the standard 'pick an option from the list and watch a few lines of dialogue play out', but the descriptions of the options – either out of a misguided attempt to be funny, or out of a need to make the most of the tiny amount of space granted to them – are almost never descriptive enough to know what on earth they actually entail. What does 'suspicious' mean in this context, Tex? Are you going to act suspicious? Are you going to regard this person with suspicion, or accuse them directly? And if so, how are you going to go about doing that? Is this going to be a tactful “I don't quite trust you yet”, or are you going to deliver a ferocious gumshoe backhand before calling them a back-stabbing, two-faced, no-good scumbag? It's a long-running theme of the Tex Murphy games that I've never been happy with, and the descriptions have only grown more and more cryptic with age. I wouldn't mind that much – especially given that these dialogue trees don't turn up nearly as often as in, say, Mass Effect – but Tesla Effect apparently has multiple paths, and I'm willing to bet that discovering most of them relies on correctly navigating these dialogue trees.

I just find it strange that Tesla Effect devotes so much time and effort towards the FMVs – a purely visual treat, I might remind you – and then spends so little on the actual game environments. If it wasn't for the occasional piece of furniture or water effect, you could squint a bit and convince yourself that you were playing a Deus Ex mod made by people who had only a passing familiarity with the Vertex Editing Tool. Don't squint too hard, though, or you might find yourself incapable of spotting the anomalously large gulf in texture quality. I mean really, I don't like to complain about graphics, and I'm still not that bothered by Tesla Effect's efforts, but it just seems like wasted effort to devote so many resources to one aspect of the game's presentation while letting the other aspect sink into mediocrity.

Overall, it really is extraordinary how successful Tesla Effect is at recreating the feel of a game from nearly two decades ago while still retaining many of the creature comforts of modern technology. Tesla Effect is a deliberate exercise in reviving a past that was long since buried, forgotten and paved over, built for the express purpose of resurrecting Tex Murphy and very little else. It's a game that's clearly been resolutely aimed at fans, which makes sense given that they're probably the only reason it exists right now, and it doesn't seem to have much ambition besides pleasing those very fans. Don't get the wrong end of the stick here: it's still a good game, no matter what your experience in the Tex Murphy series might be, but anybody hoping to see some significant evolution in the one-and-a-half decades since Overseer is going to leave with a sullen sense of disappointment. For those that just want to play another Tex Murphy game in the new millennium, Tesla Effect is a godsend; for everybody else, it's a fun but flawed call back to a past whose calls we had long since stopped returning.