An interesting adventure game that also includes side scrolling shooting scenes and a time wasting flight simulator that has high production values for the time though it is lacking in the over the top Sierra Entertainment style deaths with the at times random deaths here often giving you no more than text.
Tex Murphy is a detective working in a post-apocalyptic San Francisco in the year 2033. He is hired by Sylvia Linsky to look into her father's recent death that was declared a suicide, she both believes it to be murder and wants his life insurance policy to pay out the money that was denied her. You are given a few leads and have to choose where to begin with the case taking you around California and Nevada as you investigate the fascist Law and Order political party and their backers that were involved with Linsky and other scientists working on a mind control project.
You enter a flying speeder that you pilot to different landing locations to access areas or to meet people. These flight sim moments are a complete waste of time, there is nothing to do but fly, you are unable to crash, and there is basically nothing to see or hear while flying. What you can do to make it more bearable is to enter auto pilot navigation coordinates so the speeder flies itself, allowing you to go do something else while the game does this and making the inclusion of these moments even more questionable outside of some badly thought out piracy protection due to your early coordinates being in the game's manual. The speeder is also where you can save your game or contact two people through your video phone that you might be able to get additional information from.
Traveling to a location can lead to a few different kinds of events. You can go somewhere where you just meet a person who is represented in a picture with their dialogue underneath where you can type in questions to ask them or attempt to bribe or threaten them if they refuse to give you information. You might enter an area where you just get a full screen of text detailing your investigation or a minor character you meet. You might enter a side scrolling shooting section where you fight an infinite number of enemies and pass the section by advancing all the way to the right twice while crouching to avoid bullets and shooting enemies in your path. These short and passable for the PC at the time sections are made worse by you actually being able to run out of bullets and possibly needing to pawn items or make money hunting bounties (with a nav coordinate and combat encounter) in order to get money to pay for more ammo and to pay for bribes. In these conversations you are trying to find out new information and keywords that might work in other conversations or to gain access to new navigation codes for unexplored locations. The final type of area you can access is an actual location where the game appears more like a more common style of adventure game, only you have no point and click interface and your choices aren't handled by typing text either. Instead you select locations given to you that have interactable objects with you then choosing a few different options for how you want to interact look, get, move, open, on/off, and taste (typically just to lead to jokes or possibly a sudden ways to kill yourself).
For 1989 the game looks good with some nice background and digitized photos of actors when you get into conversations with the game's characters. The Real Sound also gives you moments of short but good quality voiced lines. Music variety is limit to one track but it is good and the sound effects are also of high quality for the time when they play.
Its a good adventure game with good production for the time that has some of the humor the later FMV games in the series are known for and a game that would have been even better if it just stuck to the one genre without generic bad (and out of place) 80s PC shooting scenes and a flight simulator that seems designed more to put you to sleep and to make sure you are keeping track of navigation codes then to entertain you.
The game was somewhat remade in Tex Murphy: Overseer but the framing was as Tex telling the story of an early case with some plot elements changed.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1757921208736292881
Tex Murphy is a detective working in a post-apocalyptic San Francisco in the year 2033. He is hired by Sylvia Linsky to look into her father's recent death that was declared a suicide, she both believes it to be murder and wants his life insurance policy to pay out the money that was denied her. You are given a few leads and have to choose where to begin with the case taking you around California and Nevada as you investigate the fascist Law and Order political party and their backers that were involved with Linsky and other scientists working on a mind control project.
You enter a flying speeder that you pilot to different landing locations to access areas or to meet people. These flight sim moments are a complete waste of time, there is nothing to do but fly, you are unable to crash, and there is basically nothing to see or hear while flying. What you can do to make it more bearable is to enter auto pilot navigation coordinates so the speeder flies itself, allowing you to go do something else while the game does this and making the inclusion of these moments even more questionable outside of some badly thought out piracy protection due to your early coordinates being in the game's manual. The speeder is also where you can save your game or contact two people through your video phone that you might be able to get additional information from.
Traveling to a location can lead to a few different kinds of events. You can go somewhere where you just meet a person who is represented in a picture with their dialogue underneath where you can type in questions to ask them or attempt to bribe or threaten them if they refuse to give you information. You might enter an area where you just get a full screen of text detailing your investigation or a minor character you meet. You might enter a side scrolling shooting section where you fight an infinite number of enemies and pass the section by advancing all the way to the right twice while crouching to avoid bullets and shooting enemies in your path. These short and passable for the PC at the time sections are made worse by you actually being able to run out of bullets and possibly needing to pawn items or make money hunting bounties (with a nav coordinate and combat encounter) in order to get money to pay for more ammo and to pay for bribes. In these conversations you are trying to find out new information and keywords that might work in other conversations or to gain access to new navigation codes for unexplored locations. The final type of area you can access is an actual location where the game appears more like a more common style of adventure game, only you have no point and click interface and your choices aren't handled by typing text either. Instead you select locations given to you that have interactable objects with you then choosing a few different options for how you want to interact look, get, move, open, on/off, and taste (typically just to lead to jokes or possibly a sudden ways to kill yourself).
For 1989 the game looks good with some nice background and digitized photos of actors when you get into conversations with the game's characters. The Real Sound also gives you moments of short but good quality voiced lines. Music variety is limit to one track but it is good and the sound effects are also of high quality for the time when they play.
Its a good adventure game with good production for the time that has some of the humor the later FMV games in the series are known for and a game that would have been even better if it just stuck to the one genre without generic bad (and out of place) 80s PC shooting scenes and a flight simulator that seems designed more to put you to sleep and to make sure you are keeping track of navigation codes then to entertain you.
The game was somewhat remade in Tex Murphy: Overseer but the framing was as Tex telling the story of an early case with some plot elements changed.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1757921208736292881