Adventure Gamers - Forums

“That Slade fight in Overseer was the worst thing in the (post-UAKM) series. It was the one part where they actually resorted to the sort of “FMV-game” tropes that gave the genre a bad name in the first place.”

(shrug) It was a reasonably choreographed sequence that provided an interesting change of pace, did a decent mix of violence and humour, was the series’ first bit of physical violence that wasn’t hilariously bad, and helped cover up the fact that Klaus was dreadful. And it was short enough not to be too much of a drag.

I liked it just fine. And at least they had Norton there to actually fight someone.

(And the worst thing in the 3D games was and remains the goddamn Alien Abductor.)

I still think you’re nuts if you call Overseer a better game than Tesla Effect. Or at least a nostalgic in need of a refresher.

Well, technically I never actually said that. I said that it was a better first game to play.

That said, it is. While it’s nowhere near as good as Pandora, and Alcatraz especially is terrible (though not as bad as Tesla Legacy), it’s a far more consistent game, its plot beats stronger, its emotional core so much better handled, and it handles being a game on tight production values much better than Tesla, which tries to throw in far, far more than it can handle and ultimately collapses in on itself as a result.

(Really, that’s what I think fundamentally went wrong in Tesla. I have other issues, but that’s the core one. Too many plot points, too many characters, too many game days, too many path related issues, and so on. It breaks its own back. It’s a big reason why I’m really looking forward to reading the novel, which has to focus. I’m really interested to see the critical path from Connors’ point of view, minus other concerns.)

Had Tesla continued as it was in the first half though? No, Overseer would have been firmly in third place.

Overseer was a very limited game, meant to be shorter, and then stretched to be longer with artificial filler.

Tesla Effect was the opposite; a game where they came into extra money (and therefore time) ended up trying to condense two games worth of story into one game.

So Tesla is very dense at parts, and it took me more than one playthrough to digest all its plot points (and more than one to even see them for that matter), but while this is unusual for an adventure game, it’s not necessarily a flaw either.

As for the emotional core of the game, I found Tesla far more impactful than the others. Some of that is context of course; Tesla’s biggest flaw is that it really does rely on the earlier games to give its events a sense of weight. But the A Path end got me downright misty eyed and that’s something none of the games in this series (or indeed other games in general, barring maybe Gone Home) have ever done for me. In a lot of ways, it’s the best game in the series, albeit one that depends on the others to achieve that.

In any event, as someone who has written for major publications and done plenty of reviews in my day, I do feel like there are more articulate ways to express these concerns. As a reviewer, you want to avoid categorizing things as simply “good” or “bad” since tastes vary, but rather to get at what exactly might make them enjoyable to one person and not to another. That inability to project why someone might enjoy the areas of the game you did not is why I don’t think that review was a particularly helpful one to the audience.

Richard - 17 May 2014 11:25 PM

Had Tesla continued as it was in the first half though?

Did UAKM or PD do this? I seem to remember they likewise abandoned Chandler Ave and dove off into crazy conspiracy plot points as well. It’s rather par for the course in a Tex Murphy adventure.

Tesla Effect was the opposite; a game where they came into extra money (and therefore time) ended up trying to condense two games worth of story into one game.

Yes, I’m aware. And I think that was a mistake. Hence, my feel that they bit off too much. Too much stuff, not enough focus, in much the same way that Hollywood passion projects tend to suffer.

So Tesla is very dense at parts, and it took me more than one playthrough to digest all its plot points (and more than one to even see them for that matter), but while this is unusual for an adventure game, it’s not necessarily a flaw either.

Not necessarily. But Tesla’s handling of it is poor. The A path is by far the strongest, because it’s the only one that makes emotional sense to Tex as he is now. The Tex of The Pandora Directive was a far more malleable character, which is calcified in Overseer. The other romantic options here don’t fit given that in his head, he was at the Golden Pagoda at most a week and a half ago, and gets the option to wander afield before.

Its paths also heavily rely on information that’s not well presented, not least the flashbacks that are meant to come in his dreams but we never see (and then get shoved to the side so that the Ariel path can have A Special Thing) and assorted other problems, from the continuity error where Tex is taken to the Translator’s Bond lair to how much stuff goes unseen or unspoken or just generally confused. Hell, when I finished it the first time I’d completely lost track of what the hell the Translator was trying to do, except look like the most fabulous Phantom of the Opera this side of King Tut’s tomb. Pandora’s pathing was far, far more effective because it focused primarily on Tex’s attitude and how that shifted his alliances and approach to the big treasure hunt, and if anything, that’s really how it should have gone here as well - which life he embraced, more than the token efforts in that direction. Making it revolve around romances was just a terrible idea that doesn’t fit the story being told, as well as wasting the two love interest characters on the alternate paths.

Multiple paths that reward further play are a cool idea in theory, but a dangerous gamble. Here, I think it would have been far better to have one, and some more stuff scattered around the edges for further exploration. If you get onto the A path, the ending at least gets the core that Tex deserves, even if the journey has a lot of problems. Otherwise, not so much. And the most important playthrough for any narrative game is always the first. I’ve seen the Chelsee ending, but that doesn’t overwrite the fact that the first ending I got was Petrified Forest.  Especially as I’d been making a point of having Tex chase after Chelsee, if apparently not enough.

As a reviewer, you want to avoid categorizing things as simply “good” or “bad” since tastes vary, but rather to get at what exactly might make them enjoyable to one person and not to another.

No, you really don’t, not as such, because you can’t possibly speak for anyone but yourself and down that path lies the banned phrase “If you like this sort of thing, you’ll like this.” You want to give your opinion in a way that the reader can parse according to their own tastes and get a feel for whether or not they’re going to like it*. I’ve bought and played many games because I could tell that something that didn’t click with the reviewer was likely to do so for me, not least Under A Killing Moon back in the day. Sometimes though, there are simply limits to how much you can provide, and for that matter, what people will read into scores, no matter what the words say. Hence the classic demand for “objectivity” when what people mean is “a score I agree with”, or in this case its close sibling “You just don’t GET it.” Well, no. I disagree. I got it just fine, until it let itself down on the fifth day. Even if everyone else in the world disagrees, that’s still my opinion and the only one it’s honest to give. Whether it’s a good review or not, well, that’s not my call. Either way, I’m sorry it didn’t do it for you.

(* What you don’t do is take on a game for review you know up front you’re not going to like, or is in a genre you have no understanding/points of comparison on, because that doesn’t help anyone. Hence clunky horrors like a review I remember that listed “Cons: It’s A Strategy Game”. Or any adventure game review whose first paragraph starts with some variant of “They’ve been dead for many years, but-”)

Did UAKM or PD do this? I seem to remember they likewise abandoned Chandler Ave and dove off into crazy conspiracy plot points as well. It’s rather par for the course in a Tex Murphy adventure.

I said nothing about staying on Chandler Avenue.

But I am now going to try and get some sleep, because it’s finally cool enough to.

Richard - 18 May 2014 12:30 AM

No, you really don’t, not as such, because you can’t possibly speak for anyone but yourself and down that path lies the banned phrase “If you like this sort of thing, you’ll like this.” You want to give your opinion in a way that the reader can parse according to their own tastes and get a feel for whether or not they’re going to like it*.

That latter part “in a way that the reader can parse according to their own tastes” is what you’ve completely missed in your review. You make broad statements about “quality” which are not articulate to readers and then go as far to speak for Tex fans.

I’m not trying to say your opinion is invalid, but even a cursory glance at these forums, the user ratings on GOG or Metacritic, etc reveals undeniably that your opinion is a contrarian one, starkly opposed to the opinion of other long-time fans. Contrarian criticism is important, of course, but it bears an additional burden of communicating why exactly these things bother you in particular.

Hence the classic demand for “objectivity” when what people mean is “a score I agree with”,

I’m certainly not psychotic enough to think a review can be objective, and I haven’t even mentioned the score (nor has anyone else here that I’ve noticed). The only thing I have a problem about is that you don’t give anyone reading the ability to understand the game’s problems relative to the rest of the series.

You give SOME specifics, but nothing that can illuminate to a reader why this one is different from others. Generic archetypical logic puzzles? Always been there. Third act that veers off into dense conspiracy exposition? Par for the course.

So I’m not saying that there isn’t a reason why you didn’t enjoy this game as much, but I am saying that you were unsuccessful in your attempts to communicate exactly what that was, which makes for a very poor coupling for how utterly emphatic it is. There’s really nothing worse than someone who’s very upset but unclear about why.

I gotta say, I agree with most of the points in Richard’s review. I wouldn’t have ranked it as low as he did, but I was annoyed with the filler puzzles in Sesen and the gratuitous death scenes in the Tesla Legacy Society (might have been all right if there were more to them than the boring generic death animation and stock responses from Smart Alex; I only found one that was accompanied by a funny animation). Maybe it’s not so bad in Casual mode?

I should also mention that I got The Petrified Forest ending as well, but contrary to Richard I didn’t feel disappointed with it. It’s an awesome cut-scene, even if I’m not entirely certain what was actually going on. It’s either a pop-culture reference I don’t get or I’m missing details on the story that are only available on other paths.

Perhaps the game will redeem itself on the other story paths. I do think that a single playthrough should be able to stand on its own, though. In some games, like 999 where the actual story is part of the puzzle, it’s fine to leave out important parts depending on how the story branches. But I don’t think it worked that well here.

In Pandora, the Lombard Street endings were the easiest to get. You had to work a little on your (bad) attitude in order to get bumped to Boulevard of Broken Dreams. If I had ended up on that path on my first playthrough, I’d probably have liked the game less. Maybe it would have been good if they made it easier to stay on the “meatier” paths. The ending I got would have worked better as a bonus alternative way to end the story—the way I regard the Boulevard path of Pandora.

harald - 18 May 2014 11:37 AM

I gotta say, I agree with most of the points in Richard’s review. I wouldn’t have ranked it as low as he did, but I was annoyed with the filler puzzles in Sesen and the gratuitous death scenes in the Tesla Legacy Society (might have been all right if there were more to them than the boring generic death animation and stock responses from Smart Alex; I only found one that was accompanied by a funny animation). Maybe it’s not so bad in Casual mode?

Yes! It’s just as bad in Casual mode but don’t know whether it’s easier? I didn’t mind Sesen so much & just found the stealth part more annoying than anything. In the Tesla Legacy Society there seemed like a lot to do & I thought the addition of ‘obstacles’ to cause the death scenes was just too much & unnecessarily interrupted the flow!

Ok finished it and i’m really disappointed with the way they handled the last days… I LOVED it till about day 8/9. The Tesla Society was beyond boring, yes it was classic Tex, but i hated every moment of it. The graphics are mediocre at best and at the beginning there are tons of FMV scenes interrupting gameplay and its never really annoying. But when you start exploring large, empty, boring spaces for a longer time it starts to get a bit tedious and IMO totally unnecessary. I feel the last days just enhanced small annoyances from the rest of the game to much larger proportions. In small doses it was fine (like Sesen, except for the beyond stupid “stealth”), but when i reached the Tesla society, all i could see were pointless scavenger hunts, made so you “explore” the boring, uninteresting and rather dead scenery.

Till day 8/9 i had a blast. Chris does a terrific job (his acting has really improved or maybe he had better direction) as does most of the other cast. I just didn’t like the blond “surgically enhanced” lady (to put it mildly), she was very unconvincing.

Doom:

Don’t confuse irony and snark with cynicism. There’s a distinction.

Snark is often conflated with cynicism, which is a troublesome misreading. Snark may speak in cynical terms about a cynical world, but it is not cynicism itself. It is a theory of cynicism.

The practice of cynicism is smarm.

- Tom Scocca, On Smarm

A critic who speaks passionately is vulnerable. Snarky digs from people who disagree aren’t a problem, really. That’s just banter. What really gets under a critic’s skin is sanctimony, the smarmy virtue arguments:

Well, that reviewer’s just going on and an about their opinion… don’t you think they should be a little more objective and professional? They’re kind of mean, aren’t they? I bet they’ve never made a game themselves in their lives! How are you supposed to know a0 nything about adventure games if you haven’t made one? And they probably aren’t a real fan after all.

One defense against this smarmy nonsense is to speak passionately in an entertaining way. That way, even if your critics accuse you of being biased and emotional (in other words, human), they still can’t accuse you of being tedious. But this defense opens up a new vulnerability - the argument from lack of sincerity.

Calling a critic insincere without strong justification is bad pool, nastier than the chilliest snark. This counterattack…

1) ...assumes that the critic’s comedy is in service of apathy, nihilism, or even hipsterism, as opposed to a real point.

2) ...has no rebuttal. If you say nothing, the smarmy person wins! Obviously, you don’t care enough to reply. If you say something, well… “methinks the lady doth protest too much.” The well is poisoned.

You could, of course, demand critics be more “objective.” That would avoid the problem… right?

But unfortunately, the most objectively measurable qualities of games - photorealism, play length, etc. - are the ones where adventure games tend to lose out. What about judging a game by “how well it handles the conventions of its genre?” That just makes the problem worse. High scores end up going to games which take the fewest risks and devote the most processing power and money to creating the blandest possible grimy mess of bullets and dirt.

Besides, how long does it take for genre conventions to change? Are we still allowed to give icon-based games a low score because a text parser allows more player freedom, and graphical adventures are vulnerable to “victory by inventory-spamming?”

It’s not the objective critics, the ones who assess gameplay on its own merits, who’ve been trying to keep adventure games afloat. It’s the ones who are enthusiastically and often angrily personal. More so than just about any other game genre, adventure games must be judged subjectively. They depend intensely on storytelling, the likability of their characters, and the personal way that a puzzle “clicks” for the player.

I don’t read a critic to hear objective discussion of how well a game runs. I can get the objective stuff from forum threads. A good games critic:

1) Has sound judgment and expresses it clearly.
2) Cares about games.

If a critic’s really good, I’ll read reviews of a game I’ve already played, just to see how it came across to another player.

Cobbett’s review of Tesla Effect was close to my own experience. The fifth day made me angry enough to shout at my monitor. “YOU MUST BE JOKING!” I said, when I learned that not only was I searching for quest trinkets, but that one of those quest trinkets had been broken into teeny pieces for the sake of padding out an already tedious chapter. If there was any time they should have used Kevin Murphy’s Smart Alex voice for comic relief, it was there.

Day 5 would’ve been a lot more tolerable with Kevin Murphy making Professor Layton jokes. But then, the designers would have had to admit the chapter had been, in hindsight, a bad idea. And that would have been snarky and unserious.

Day 9 was not as consistently bad as day 5, in my mind, but it was also consistently bad.

And just to sacrifice a calf of faint praise on the altar of balanced criticism, I should note that the game wasn’t as universally bad from day 5 on as Richard says. After Sesen (Tex Murphy’s Hidden Object Adventures!), it seemed to be regaining momentum before the Tesla Legacy Society derailed it again. The choices on Day 7 were kind of hokey, but it was the kind of hokeyness I signed up for when I bought a Tex Murphy game.

Monolith - 19 May 2014 01:34 AM

Is it just me, or was Smart Alex kind of non-existant for most of the game? I kind of felt like the character didn’t play all that much of a role. Is he more important for those that play Casual? I only played in Gamer mode.

I played in Casual mode but to compare it’s a question that can really only be answered by a gamer that’s tried both modes! It wasn’t a feature of the game that didn’t spoil anything but one that I personally thought it could have done without & didn’t for me gel too well. I would have preferred any comments to have been made as aloud thoughts by Tex himself even after death!

Or James Earl Jones!