YMMV / Tex Murphy

• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The intro cinematic to Under a Killing Moon starts with a WW2 newsreel, followed by a sequence of what appears to be robed cultists milling around ruins where one of them finds a statue of a bird and raises it up towards the sky. Tex's initial case in the game is to investigate the theft of that same statue, but otherwise what all this has to do with anything is left unanswered. Word of God has clarified it was intended to show how the organization obsessed with racial purity that is behind everything dates back at least to Those Wacky Nazis.
• Complete Monster: Lowell Percival, from Under a Killing Moon, is the secret leader of the Crusade of Genetic Purity. Seeking to "cleanse" the Earth of impure life, Percival has his top assassin, the Chameleon, eliminate a great deal of obstacles and loose ends to get his hands on the necessary component to create a powerful virus. Testing it on unwilling subjects, Percival intends to release it into the atmosphere of Earth, exterminating all life save the few he deems worthy to survive in his space station, the Moon Child.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Several examples.
  • The NSA renaming itself the National Surveillance Agency seems almost prophetic in light of the 2013 leaks.
  • There's a gag in The Pandora Directive about Archie Ellis refering Tex to a reference book about UFO conspiracy theories which states at least one American President being a secret alien. Tex later declares, "It had to have been Clinton. Now SHE was an alien!". Fast forward twenty years after the game was made to 2016...
• Sequel Displacement: There were many who thought the franchise began with Under A Killing Moon, which was actually the third game in the series.
• That One Level: The developers seem to have a bad habit of making frustrating sections where the "puzzle" is how to precisely maneuver around deadly hazards.
  • The lava maze room in the Mayan Temple on Day Nine in Gamer Mode of The Pandora Directive. It's bad enough to navigate once. It's even worse if you get through it and realize you forgot to pick up one of the items you need for the end of the game in the first half of the temple. To the game's credit, it won't let you advance to the final room without the needed items. The bad news is this means you have to go through the maze two more times like this Let's Play author did.
  • The air duct maze, also in The Pandora Directive. At one point you have to send a remote-controlled robot in an air duct, guide it to rooms that you have to Pixel Hunt for items, and bring it back. You thought the movement controls were bad during the normal game? Here they are even worse, not in the least helped by the fact that the duct contains hazards such as lethal fans which require tricky timing to bypass. The maze is rather large with little variation, making for a tedious experience.
  • The art gallery in J. Saint Gideon's mansion of Overseer. There's a pattern to which parts of the floor are effected by an "Instant Death" Radius effect and there's no visual cues to help you with the timing. You just have to memorize the pattern and hope for the best.
  • The Tesla Institute in Tesla Effect. Between the giant flies in The Atrium and the mines on the floor, it's incredibly easy to wind up seemingly dying for no apparent reason. And then there's the giant spider in the maze...

---