One of the early FMV games that both plays well and has a story and many comedic moments that work well because of the better acting and writing rather than the more common unintentional humor from incompetence often found in the genre.
Set in 2042, three years after Martian Memorandum, Tex has married and divorced Sylvia from Mean Streets and realizes that he has hit rock bottom and its time to turn his career around. Succesfully catching the criminal and retrieving a stolen item for a local pawn shop gets Tex back on his feet and leads to a larger case the following day that promises Tex a large amount of money but puts him in the path of the doomsday cult the Brotherhood of Purity. Now playing as more of an FMV interactive movie there are frequent FMV scenes with controlling dialogue choices, each character you interact with his voiced and portrayed by an actor, and there is more interaction with objects as you explore areas. Margot Kidder plays a role and James Earl Jones provides voice work as God (or The Big P.I. in the Sky) who decides to become personally involved in Tex's case believing that he will need all the help he can get.
Gameplay has you moving around areas in a first person view and hitting the spacebar to bring up your options for interacting with the environment or talking to people, entering buildings often begins a scene of you talking to someone or with a still shot of the location with Tex and the character interacting until you choose to leave. When you hit the spacebar you can see the top left of your screen while the bottom becomes options for how to interact and for text and subtitles and the right side shows you conversation options, questions to ask, the ability to view your inventory and combine items, a fast travel button, and access to a hint button. Successful actions give you a score like old adventure games while using hints can tell you what to do but lowers your score, the hints themselves can tell you exactly what to do but are often accessed in a step by step form so if you only need the next step but not an entire solution it is often good for that. Everything works really well except for the awkward movement as you control your walking by moving the mouse and look up and down with the arrow keys. It doesn't sound that bad but you don't just move with your mouse movements, as you move the mouse you are setting a constant speed in that direction until you move the opposite way to slow or stop so with a modern mouse a fairly slight movement can send you flying forward or backwards while spinning in constant rapid circles around a room. Moving slowly I was able to control it without even turning my mouse sensitivity down but it takes some getting used to.
The story keeps you interested. The jokes often land and when it becomes more corny it is often as an intentional spoof of the detective genre. Exploring the environments soon shows that Tex has an amusing quip or story about many of the random objects you can interact with. As you often aren't getting the best when a company uses its own employees to play characters, it is surprising that Tex ends up as one of the best portrayed characters while always being played by the game's director and designer and by a founder and the Chief Financial Officer of the company. Puzzles are typically logical and finding what you need to in the environment doesn't devolve into pixel hunting.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1789880623579987975
Set in 2042, three years after Martian Memorandum, Tex has married and divorced Sylvia from Mean Streets and realizes that he has hit rock bottom and its time to turn his career around. Succesfully catching the criminal and retrieving a stolen item for a local pawn shop gets Tex back on his feet and leads to a larger case the following day that promises Tex a large amount of money but puts him in the path of the doomsday cult the Brotherhood of Purity. Now playing as more of an FMV interactive movie there are frequent FMV scenes with controlling dialogue choices, each character you interact with his voiced and portrayed by an actor, and there is more interaction with objects as you explore areas. Margot Kidder plays a role and James Earl Jones provides voice work as God (or The Big P.I. in the Sky) who decides to become personally involved in Tex's case believing that he will need all the help he can get.
Gameplay has you moving around areas in a first person view and hitting the spacebar to bring up your options for interacting with the environment or talking to people, entering buildings often begins a scene of you talking to someone or with a still shot of the location with Tex and the character interacting until you choose to leave. When you hit the spacebar you can see the top left of your screen while the bottom becomes options for how to interact and for text and subtitles and the right side shows you conversation options, questions to ask, the ability to view your inventory and combine items, a fast travel button, and access to a hint button. Successful actions give you a score like old adventure games while using hints can tell you what to do but lowers your score, the hints themselves can tell you exactly what to do but are often accessed in a step by step form so if you only need the next step but not an entire solution it is often good for that. Everything works really well except for the awkward movement as you control your walking by moving the mouse and look up and down with the arrow keys. It doesn't sound that bad but you don't just move with your mouse movements, as you move the mouse you are setting a constant speed in that direction until you move the opposite way to slow or stop so with a modern mouse a fairly slight movement can send you flying forward or backwards while spinning in constant rapid circles around a room. Moving slowly I was able to control it without even turning my mouse sensitivity down but it takes some getting used to.
The story keeps you interested. The jokes often land and when it becomes more corny it is often as an intentional spoof of the detective genre. Exploring the environments soon shows that Tex has an amusing quip or story about many of the random objects you can interact with. As you often aren't getting the best when a company uses its own employees to play characters, it is surprising that Tex ends up as one of the best portrayed characters while always being played by the game's director and designer and by a founder and the Chief Financial Officer of the company. Puzzles are typically logical and finding what you need to in the environment doesn't devolve into pixel hunting.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1789880623579987975