Tex Murphy: The Pandora Directive

The Pandora Directive is a full-motion video interactive, point and click game. The story revolves around our hero, Tex Murphy, the down and out PI, always between jobs. The opening scene is frightening as a man in black and masked paws through a sleeping woman's possession with her in the room, but oops! she's not sleeping. The scene shifts to The Brew and Stew where Tex is busy alienating his love interest Chelsee Bando. (He has a problem with commitment.) After Chelsee leaves and his friends berate him for his lack of sensitivity, a stranger buys him a drink and asks for his assistance in locating a missing person. From here the plot has lots of twists and turns; serial killer on the loose, government conspiracy (The Truth is Out There), ancient civilizations and trying to get the love/commitment thing going. The story is full of great puzzles of various difficulties. Most of which are fun and not too daunting. You can choose at the beginning to play on Entertainment Mode which has a built in hint system that costs you points to use and affects your final score (for those who are interested in scores) or you can play in Game Player Mode and you're on your own. If you do try to use the hint system in Game Player Mode you are put into the Entertainment Mode. Game Player mode has a few more puzzles in it and they are a little harder. There are seven endings to the game based on the decisions you make; will you give the money back to the orphans or keep it? will you return your rotten landlord's wallet?, etc. The ending of the game is a zinger!! It really made me go WOW! I have played this game at least 10 times and it is IMHO the very best game ever made bar none.

The Pandora Directive: interesting characters, an enthralling story, multiple paths to multiple endings, humour, pathos. Everything I've ever wanted in a game, Pandora Directive delivers. It's only flaws are the flaws of technology: it doesn't look nearly as good as a modern game, and some of the acting is by-god awful. But even taking that into account, this is easily a 4 star game. Play it, play it, play it!

The acting didn't feel overly cheap, the movie scenes actually kept me interested. The final scenes of the game/movie really gave a sense of accomplishment in having reached the end. The multiple choice timeline made the game replayable. I played "under a killing moon" and "the pandora directive" several times each until the discs died from overuse (the constant disc swapping was the ONLY annoyance).

Who would believe that the follow up of Under a killing moon could be better? But it was. Bigger and better. It even got more cd-discs to switch. So happy that gog shows how it is playing without any swapping of discs.

I had never played any of them when I bought the Tex Murphy games on gog some time ago during a sale. I finally got around to playing them. While Under a Killing Moon was fun with lots of goofy humor and cheesy cutscenes and some potential and good ideas it was clearly something not meant to be taken too seriously either by the player or the creators. Pandora Directive is when Tex Murphy became for me a real game series to be respected. It plays much the same as UaKM and has some of the same problems but everything is just done better here. The plot is more complex and involved, the puzzles are better, the acting and general quality of the cutscenes are MUCH better and the game itself is about twice as long and is a true epic by adventure game standards. It fulfilled the potential of the previous game and more. It's easily one of the best adventure games of the 90s and is a must play for any adventure game fan.