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Review of Tex Murphy: Overseer by Niclas

Stars - 45

Rating by Niclas posted on Feb 16, 2013 | edit | delete


Amazing Game!!!


I finally got Overseer to work on my computer after 6 months of trial and error, and I finished the game yesterday. I played it straight for 15 hours per day over the weekend. Man, this is a good game. I’m a big fan of the previous UAKM and Pandora Directive, and I was a little bit worried that this part would not live up to those games sine I read a few reviews that said it was not as good. I can tell you this; I really loved this game as well. Story and acting is as always good, the plot might not be as good as Pandora Directive, but still VERY good. What Overseer actually did better than Pandora is the stand-alone puzzles and inventory puzzles. Just the right amount of stand alone puzzles (I’m usually not a big fan of too many of these per game, and when playing Pandora I was a little bit overwhelmed since there were so many of them, and I got a little bit bored in the end.). In Overseer there is a great pace of a mix of inventory puzzles and isolated puzzles. Also noted that many of the stand alone/isolated puzzles are more interesting this time around since they require the player to gather pieces of information in the environment to solve it, instead of just relying for instance on solving a jigsaw or a slider puzzle. Of course there are unfortunately puzzles like that, but still less. Examples of stand alone puzzles that I enjoyed was figuring out the combination to a safe by understanding time zone differences in different cities by referring to a map and another clue, or using bible references to solve a hidden message, or figure out another safe combination by referring to the letters on the buttons on a phone. I find these kinds of isolated puzzles more interesting rather than just randomly push buttons until you see a pattern (those kind of puzzles are just tiresome and time consuming, and rely to much on trial and error, and I almost always end up consulting a walkthrough to save the time)

The inventory puzzles are also very fun and clever (something I really missed from UAKM, where the gameplay was focused on these kind of puzzles instead of stand alones).  2 parts of Overseer that I especially enjoyed playing was when Tex breaks into a hitman’s hotel room while the guy is taking a shower. This part requires Tex to search the hotel room, while hiding from time to time in different locations like in the wardrobe and shower to avoid getting caught. Another one was when Tex is searching a cabin for evidence while being under attack. Both these parts of the game had some really fun and clever inventory puzzles that Tex had to do to avoid being killed/caught. It really got me involved in the solutions to the problem in a different way that no other adventure game had done before.

The reason that it is not as good as Pandora Directive and not getting a full 5 score is that the environments in the game does not feel 100% Tex Murphy, the game is more of a pure Film Noir (which is definitely not bad at all, but it is not the Tex universe that I got to know), rather like UAKM and Pandora being a combination of different elements like Film Noir/Blade Runner/Indiana Jones.

Overall great game with fun inventory and stand alone puzzles which are well integrated into the environment, solid story, and great acting (most of the time). Play it


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Time Played: Over 20 hours
Difficulty: Hard

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