Under a Killing Moon dramatically shifted the gameplay of its predecessors in the series by fully utilizing interactive 3D environments.

Recently divorced from his wife Sylvia, out of work, low on cash, and living in a run-down part of Old San Francisco, Tex realizes that he has to get his act together.

Then a mysterious woman calling herself Countess Renier, having heard good things about Tex, hires him to find her missing statuette.

However, everything quickly goes downhill when Tex finds out about a doomsday plot by a deadly cult calling themselves the Brotherhood of Purity.

The game combined full motion video (FMV) cutscenes with an advanced 3D virtual world to explore.

It is notable that the game's 3D graphics did not use ray casting techniques like Doom, but true texture-mapped polygons that allowed players to look in all directions as well as duck, and ran in then-high resolutions of up to 640x480.

[6] Following Under a Killing Moon's launch in late 1994,[7] market research firm PC Data named it the United States' fifth-best-selling computer game of November.

[14] In 2002, Adventure Gamers gave it a score of 4.5 out of 5, praising a mystery plot, characters and a classic Tex Murphy humor.

The final ending of the game (meeting The Colonel and Eva in the bar, and dancing lessons with Delores Lightbody) is also changed to continue this style.