There’s five things that you should know about me, on top of the stuff you may already know about me; I have a profound appreciation and soft spot for the adorable jankiness of 90’s FMV games, I am in fact unfathomably handsome and a completely well adjusted adult with no presenting neuroses, I have another soft spot for puzzle-adventure games as a lifelong casual fan, I enjoy very odd humour that may even be considered bad by most people, I’m a great aficionado of the pulp noir detective shtick, my psychosis in thinking I’m actually an octopus includes pretending to shoot imaginary ink everywhere while saying “uh oh, inky!” in a funny voice to anyone around me, and I sometimes struggle to do basic math including single digit counting. I’d try and count the jokes in this silly opening, but again; I struggle with single digit counting. That bit is not a joke.
Where was I? Oh right; there’s a substantial amount of crossover between the ‘FMV’, ‘puzzle-adventure’ and ‘odd sense of humour’ categories of my previously listed enjoyments, but not often do those three intersect with my love of a good ol’ hard-boiled 40’s gumshoe stereotype. It usually only interacts with one of those other ones, maybe two of them, but never all three of them. There’s Mythos Software’s 1996 Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Rose which is fine, considering the title is longer than the game itself, and Holmes predates that specific type of detective stereotype I’m down bad with by a few decades. Where’s the bittersweet saxophone solos, and the gruff stoicism and the tortured past, you know? The femme fatales and the bourbon, and what not. Where are we going with this? I mean Tex Murphy: Under A Killing Moon. It’s the title of the article.
Under A Killing Moon is a FMV borderline comedy detective adventure game, basically. It doesn't have gruff stoicisms and tortured pasts, but it definitely makes up for it. It’s the intersection of all four categories, and I think the only one that can claim to be all four of those elements. I’ve always heard of the series being talked about in adventure game discussions, but it’s one I’ve never previously played before until now. Maybe I was too busy still trying to work my way through the Kings Quest games whenever I’d see mention of it to take a look at it, or Day of the Tentacle, or whatever other adventure game reference I can squeeze into here that I’ve played. In the spirit of trying new things, I decided to finally take a little look-see into the Tex Murphy series and decided to start with this first entry in the FMV era games.
The Boring Stuff; Access Software’s Odd Beginnings
1994’s Under A Killing Moon was created by Utah-based Access Software. Founded in 1983, they started the same way a lot of primordial game development companies did back in the days of the burgeoning home computer market; by making a lot of random ****, basically. Their debut was Neutral Zone for the Commodore64, a game so relatively forgotten it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry but is still somehow playable on the Internet Archive. You play as some sort of space turret, and you shoot hostile ships that are flying around the infinite void. As far as Commodore64 games go, it was pretty alright.They then made a few tank-fighting games with the Beach Head duology, the customary bowling game that every 80s game company made, but their big claim to fame? Golfing games. They first made the Leaderboards series, then Links which saw releases from 1990 until 2003. It was such a popular series that Microsoft bought Access in 1999, and then used the format to develop their own Microsoft Golf, based on the work of a studio they just purchased. Links: The Challenge of Golf in 1990 was so successful that it won the prestigious-for-this-still-very niche-market award ‘Best Action Game of the Year’ by none other than Computer Gaming World, one of the big heavy hitters. Apparently that was how riveting the golf simulation was, that it was the year's best action game beating out Duke Nukem, Prince of Persia and Wing Commander. Wild. Links was so successful that Access created an entire subsidiary division dedicated solely to making virtual golf game technology, called TruGolf who are in fact still in business to this very day in the world of indoor golf ranges.
Credit where it’s due; this is pretty damn impressive for a 1990 DOS game.
Its only relevant as a pretty entertaining side note, but also take a look at the screenshot again; the player is in fact an animated sprite taken from actual VHS footage of one of the founder’s brothers swinging a club against a green screen. For 1990, this was pretty groundbreaking honestly; Doom famously did something similar with its clay modeled monsters being photographed then digitized into the game as the sprites, but that didn’t come for another four years. The only other game I’m aware of to do this around this time was 88’s Narc; and I guess Journey in ‘83, but that’s best to not even look at really. Well, another game that Access made did use this technique a year earlier, being 1989’s Mean Streets, the very first Tex Murphy game.
Mean Streets allegedly came about as Access wanting to make another flight sim game after 1987's Echelon, and then also wanting to make a game based on a series of home detective movies that a bunch of them shot together just for fun, based around the hard boiled manhunter Tex Murphy; eventually, the flight sim stuff got more and more pushed to the side to make way for the detective puzzle-adventure stuff. This era of game development just sounded so wholesome, I swear; just some young entrepreneurs eating pizza and shooting movies together around making wireframe tank-battle games and golf simulators. Playing the titular man of action through the digitized sprite scans was company co-founder and finance guy, Christopher Jones, who would play the character all the way through the series as one uninterrupted character progressing more or less in real time across the games.
Mean Streets was a huge success for Access, and led to a sequel two years later in Martian Memorandum, and eventually, in 1994, the game we’re actually here to talk about; Under A Killing Moon.
Relax, we’re getting there. As a professional amateur, I have to ramble about a golf game I've never played first and build it up a little bit here.
Access Software was a company that was always trying to stay ahead of the technological race in a way; they started using digitized sprites before it was cool, and Mean Streets also shipped with their proprietary RealSound technology before being of course replaced by the industry standard SoundBlaster not too long after, enabling anyone who didn’t have a sound card to listen to ear-piercing beeps and boops. When it came time to make the third entry, they decided to go big, using the pretty good income they’d amassed up until then. Under A Killing Moon was an ambitious project; this time they were going for entirely FMV action which by 1994 was just starting to bubble into the mainstream, cost an estimated $2 mil making it **** off expensive for 1994, cutting edge sound with composers and movie styled score, cinematic direction and even more, fully 3D environments to navigate. They even hired some actual actors around using themselves here and there. Margot Kidder plays a very sassy bartender later in the game in an admittedly small role, James Earl ****ing Jones’ voice appears, and old Hollywood veteran Brian Keith of The Parent Trap and Family Affair fame plays a much bigger role as ‘The Colonel’, and there’s more than a few lesser working actors sprinkled about. Killing Moon also shipped on a whopping 4 CD-ROMs, man; Jesus. For the time, that was practically unheard of.
That’s enough rambling, let’s actually talk about Under A Killing Moon; thank you to the three people still reading this.
The Game; The Post-Apocalypse Future Detective Absurdist Comedy I Never Knew I Needed
I forgot to mention one specific thing about the series; it’s not actually set in the 1943 like its detective shtick and Tex Murphy’s overcoat and hat would make you think; Killing Moon takes place in 2043 after WWIII, which irradiated and destroyed half the Earth with nuclear inferno. Humans now live nocturnally to avoid the burning rays of the sun, the ozone layer long destroyed and also as an excuse for it always being night time in their noir story. Humanity now lives in the grungy, dirty, noir-ish ruins of New San Francisco alongside a new stage of evolution; the mutants. The irradiation has left some changed, altered on a cellular level so that they now have stage makeup and putty smeared all over their skin to make them look like weird mutants, discriminated against by the ‘norms’ and forced into Old San Francisco. Sometimes they have prosthetics that look entirely obvious and charmingly ridiculous as it should be. Oh, and Tex Murphy still can’t get his fax machine to work correctly and the electronic store next door won’t sell him a new printer until he gets a credit card from them.
This is fundamentally the greatest strength of the game; just how utterly nonsensical and bizarre its tone and setting are. It's part post-apocalypse, only nothing really has changed too much save for some characters having hilarious putty on their face. It's part gumshoe detective, only nothing is taken seriously as Tex, and by extension you, bumble your way through the increasingly insane situations you find yourself in. Its humour is constant, whether it's through Tex’s noir-parody voice over observations, the sheer absurdity of how unlucky Tex is, the goofball humour when you have to do something like impersonate a children's TV fireman personality who’s a ghastly burn victim named Inspector Burns to get into a hotel to find dirt on a pizza place owner and so you can solve the murder of Rusty the clown who was shoved into a vat of toxic waste in his novelty store's back room, and just sometimes in the equally insane people you have to talk to and deal with. Also being a 90s FMV game, it’s also in the hilarious performances by the majority of its cast of course; the FMV cheese really adds to the experience here.
Femme fatale confirmed!
Under A Killing Moon opens with you, Tex Murphy, now divorced from your ex-wife Slyvia who kept hitting on the local upholstery salesmen right in front of you and once again down on your luck after his last big case seen in the Martian Memorandum. It’s not looking good for Tex, as his former P.I mentor ‘The Colonel’ comes over to essentially **** talk him and gloat about his big new case that Tex definitely shouldn’t get involved with. This causes Tex to put on his trademark sneakers and overcoat, and hit the mean streets of Old San Francisco in his discount flying car to scrounge up work. From here, you’re let loose into a good amount of absolute ****ing nonsense as you try to find the culprit of a rash of mutant-business targeted burglaries, encounter a religious cult of human supremacists and a weirdo ancient order dating back to before Charlamagne, bribe a chocolate-tweaker bum with some pie, piece together a whole lot of torn up notes and look through only six or seven garbage cans before stopping the atmospheric release of a globally lethal virus and before you go to space.
You end up doing this kind thing a lot.
Outside of being based around FMV, it’s also another major change to the series in that it has full 3D environments that you have to move around and look at in real time in order to find the eclectic items required of you to progress. By hitting space when in an area, you’ll close your HUD and go into the movement mode to navigate around. It's both a technological showcase as this was a very rare move for 1994 keep in mind, and also alters the adventure gameplay itself. A traditional adventure game of the time took place on a 2D plane, with items maybe hidden in the sense that they’re not highlighted, but they weren’t hiding in terms of the camera; they are right there in your view. This changes it up in that locating items is now down to the player, physically moving around boxes and desks and potted plants to locate small items is now essential to your progress. You have to physically find the hidden keys, and the suction dart crossbows bolts now. Does this fundamental change work on a mechanical level? Eh.
The idea itself is great, but the actual controls for it are not. You do not use WASD for movement like you’d expect, or even the arrow keys for directional movement; you use the mouse to move, and the arrow keys to move your view up and down. By moving your mouse forwards or backwards, you move Tex in that direction with some very finicky momentum. It’s a touch greatly over-sensitive, with sometimes a very small mouse movement launching you forward at mach eight, and was really hard to wrap my head around for a good while. This of course is from the perspective of someone going back and trying Killing Moon thirty years after it came out and before a lot of these kinds of games had standardized controls, so take that into account; maybe it wasn’t so rough in 1994. The items and people you encounter are all sprite based of course save for your car which is a grey blob of amorphous low-poly metal.
Again, consider that this was 1994. The fact you can freely move through this space station hallway is damn impressive.
Once I got used to the janky navigation movement, it wasn’t really an issue and thankfully you never have to really use it with any precision or accuracy; the game doesn’t just randomly throw platforming at you, thank god.
The rest of the adventure game aspects are entirely normal for the time. You gather various odds and ends in your inventory, and you can examine them and combine them together to solve the usual strange puzzles. Talking to characters is a big part of the game, owing both to its detective and comedy stylings. Whenever you learn of a new character or learn a new clue towards the mystery, it's added to the list of topics you can ask characters which is frequently how you progress. Gotta ask the deranged and likely addled hotel clerk who eats only steaks with chocolate milk about Inspector Burns first to learn he’s obsessed with him before you can cosplay him, of course, or the literal elephant-nosed informant about how the pawn-shop burglar, who looks oddly like Stephen King only with some very fine coiffure, is terrified of clowns; ‘bozophobia’, as it’s referred to as.
Killing Moon takes place over set days of events, as well as multiple areas through driving around in Tex’s ‘31 Lighting Bolt Speeder, the 2043 equivalent of a 2014 Honda Civic. Each day has specific clues you have to find, and puzzles to solve across its areas for the different jobs you stumble your way into taking. There’s even a few puzzles that play out across these multiple days, such as having to fill out your Electronic Shop credit card application your first day, mailing it out then waiting until day two to actually receive it. You have to be able to get a new early 2000s office fax machine, somehow; it’s essential to any P.I worth his salt.
It's just been one of those weeks for old Tex.
This leads into a very important question for any puzzle-adventure game of the point-and-click-persuasion; how ****ed is the moon logic here? ‘Moon logic’ is the term coined to describe just how many leaps of reason and sanity you have to make to solve the puzzles sometimes, in true adventure game format; how obvious its puzzle logic is, and how absurd the solutions are. If the solution would only make sense to an alien from the moon instead of a rational human being, then the game has some high moon logic going on. Say you have something like a pair of scissors and a stick of gum, and there’s someone blocking a door you have to get through. A non-moon logic game would maybe have you give the person the gum to bribe them since they said earlier that they love chewing gum, or if the game is psychotic maybe threaten them with the scissors.
You definitely fill your adventure game quota of collecting random **** people leave lying around.
A moon logic game would instead have you use the scissors on the dead fish in the kitchen in order to get the fish entrails, which you then combine with the gum to create sticky guts which you then combine with the broken parachute you have to buy from a vending machine to create the fishchute in order to jump out the upper floor window to bypass the door entirely. I may have gone off a little bit on that one, but I think my meaning is clear.
Under A Killing Moon is a low moon logic game. There isn’t really anything absurd in its puzzle solutions. Most of the puzzle difficulty comes from having to physically locate the right item across its many 3D areas instead of trying to guess what esoteric and mystical level of consciousness the developers were operating on when they designed that particular obstacle. There’s still some fun involved in the solutions, befitting that this is a comedy game largely, but it’s at least still grounded in this reality to a reasonable level. You find out the burglar is afraid of clowns, you have to set a trap for him, there’s an industrial winch hook in the warehouse he hangs out in and you find a clown doll that is directly stated to have a hook on the back if you examine it; it’s not that out there to put two and two together, and the biggest obstacle is navigating to find the clown doll in its box in the locked clown novelty store. Oh, and always examine every item you pick up of course.
You really got to comb the environments in Under A Killing Moon, items are commonly held in some really hidden places.
I also wouldn't say that it's a particularly hard adventure game; you progress through again fairly reasonable item deductions, with a good amount of just exhausting every conversation topic with every character sprinkled in there until they point you in the right direction again. Sometimes you need to interrogate and coax information out of them instead through choosing the correct dialogue choices out of three options, and even those you can simply talk to them again to retry if you fail. This isn’t to say that there’s not the occasional hard puzzle situation or two. In true retro adventure game fashion, the final few puzzles you encounter are very difficult. The first one is playing a game of the classic ‘guess the right ball after they get scrambled around’ four times in a row, with you dying if you guess wrong once. The choppiness of the FMV made it a little hard to follow the right ball once or twice, but it took me a few tries and I figured it out. The very last big puzzle of the game is a particularly hard one involving waking someone up from a stasis pod. I’m not going to say much more to avoid ruining the surprise, but considering you can save right before you use it, it wasn’t insurmountable; it took me maybe about a good 30 minutes to trial-and-error my way through.
Under A Killing Moon is I think the perfect length for a puzzle-aventure game as well; my playthrough took me a little over 5 hours, accounting for the time I spent trying to figure out what to do next and go over my items, and get stuck on some puzzles here and there. A lot of FMV games like this are very short due to the sheer size of the video files, so Access really made a smart idea in putting the game on 4 CD-ROMs; it uses every single byte.
I’m going to say it; the expected FMV low video quality and mostly amateur acting doesn’t bother me in the slightest, in fact it adds to my personal enjoyment of the game and I think also matches Killing Moon’s off-beat and frequently absurdist sense of humour, but that’s a subjective opinion. Your enjoyment may of course vary. I think it’s at least one of the more even in terms of acting of many of this era FMV games I’ve played. Everyone is on a mostly even playing field of consistency, and there’s few actors who are so noticeably worse than their equally amateur peers that it’s entirely distracting. Everyone is about the same quality tier, being equal to your local sports bar’s amateur improv comedy show; they've taken maybe one class, and have some level of theoretical knowledge but definitely not enough applied experience to be good yet. Except for maybe Louie, the mutant diner owner; you can literally see the actor looking at his lines just off to the side of the camera. Hilarious.
“Not much I can do though, Murph, save for clearly reading off a cue card the producer’s holding directly beside you.”
The one actor I’ll actively praise here is Christopher Jones as Tex Murphy, who was Access Software’s accountant and co-founder. He is frequently hilarious. He has the perfect mix of deadpan delivery and good timing, and just enough inflection to make him seem all the more charismatic which is obviously important as the main character. He plays the part of this guy who’s simultaneously both the comedic foil and straight man to his own story admirably, which is no small feat. Almost no one respects him, yet he’s also usually the least weird person in the room. He’s the last of his kind in the context of the story, a fool attempting to play up being a hard-boiled detective in a world that he cannot seem to catch a break in yet he always stumbles into things as a true pulp detective. He’s a charmingly endearing putz, someone who has such an odd earnest confidence that Jones really sells. This is also of course aided by the quality comedy writing at play here, and the game frequently made me laugh. It didn’t make me roll over laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe or anything, but I was consistently chuckling and greatly amused throughout my entire time with it.
Overall, I think I ****ing love Tex Murphy: Under A Killing Moon. It filled something I didn’t realize I needed until I played it. I never would have thought that an 90s FMV game set in the nuclear post-apocalypse about a bumbling gumshoe Raymond Chandler wannabe who’s constantly getting **** on, trying to navigate a world of weirdos and silly adventure game puzzles, would hit me like this. Well okay, when I spell it out like that yeah I should have known. Why did I wait so long to try this?
The game can be an absolute ***** to get to run on modern systems. I played the GOG version, running off of a pre-configured DOSBox as per usual with them. Everything was fine at first for a good hour, then seemingly out of nowhere the dialogue audio through the emulated SoundBlaster started slowing down. Don’t know how or why but it was an easy tweak of the config file to set the cycle speed back to what it should have been. This then caused the dialogue audio to become very quiet, and I was never able to fix this regardless of how much I tinkered with the emulated sound card options. There was also frequent texture tearing and flickering, especially in the outdoor street area, but that’s to be expected. I then looked around and found someone who crafted an executable to natively run the game in Windows called WinTex; this allowed for high resolution support and fullscreen video, and even entirely changed the HUD interface and allowed for regular WASD movement. Jackpot. Only for some reason I couldn’t save in this sexy looking version? The save menu was there and the menu would close like it worked when I clicked the save button, but no save was in fact made. It also would randomly lock the mouse sometimes for a solid 20 seconds or so, inexplicably. So I played through the entire authentic DOSBox version (which was likely the best way for a review anyways) at max speaker volume with the blaring MIDI music volume muted just so I could hear the dialogue, which is a shame since the music is really good; overly dramatic horns and saxophone solos mixed with lowbeat jazz tracks really sells the noir parody schtick.
What we almost had, if it weren’t for a strange inability to save. I’ll never forget you, Under A Killing Moon in 1920x1080 resolution.
It’s a well crafted little adventure game, frequently funny and always entertaining. It's also a perfect little snapshot of this era of FMV games made by some guys who genuinely seemed to like goofing off, and wanted to goof off about a silly detective story with an increasingly bizarre setting and story direction, especially when the Native American shape shifter gets involved. The plot goes some places.
I don’t know what’s happening here.
It doesn’t get more fun than this, even accounting for the terrible movement controls. Just don’t worry about that stuff, and have fun, you know? It reminds me a lot of a profoundly less violent version of 1996’s Harvester, just in that it carries the same odd sense of humour and lack of taking itself seriously. If you're a fan of adventure games or cheesy 90s FMVs or odd detective parodies, or all three, I highly recommend checking Tex Murphy: Under A Killing Moon out; I highly doubt it will disappoint you.
Until next time.
Pros
- + Fantastic sense of odd humour.
- + Great and logical puzzle designs.
- + Boundary pushing 3D environments for its time.
- + Killer noir inspired soundtrack.
Cons
- - Controls can take some getting used to.
- - Some rough technical issues on modern systems.
8
out of 10
Overall
Under A Killing Moon is one of the most consistently funny games I've played, and also a fantastic puzzle-adventure game. The fully modeled and explorable 3D environments added a unique flavour of item-hunting for it's time, and combined with the stellar soundtrack and adorably FMV cheesiness, it creates one of the best adventure games I've played as well. You do like FMV cheesiness, right?
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