REVIEW: Murdered: Soul Suspect

What lies beyond death? Do our eyes close upon this world and open in the promised utopia of Heaven? Perhaps there is nothing beyond the veil but eternal darkness. But what if nothing changes? What if we get up one moment, leaving our bodies behind us but are stuck between moving on and the mortal plane? It’s been a long discussed point among spiritualists that ghosts are lingering souls of thosewith unresolved business.

Business doesn’t get more unresolved for Ronan O’Connor, small time criminal turned detective in Salem, Massachusetts. After being murdered in cold blood, Ronan resolves to track his unknown killer down so he can move into the light and leave the between world, or the “Dusk” behind.

Thankfully, being the town where the Salem Witch Trials were held, there are no shortage of phantom friends to interrogate and help out along the way.

After a brief introduction to your new life,you’re given the rules. You can’t pass into consecrated homes, as most are these days. The only way you can enter a building is through an open door or window, though once you’re inside, you’re free to roam. You can’t directly interact with objects, being that your ghostly appendages pass through them. You can walk through walls and doors that aren’t consecrated, and usually an ectoplasmic residue will be left on passable surfaces.

It’s clear crime waits for no man, live or dead; you’re cracking on with investigating your first crime scene. The scene of your death.

Murdered: Soul Suspect doesn’t hold your hand much at all in where crime scene investigation is concerned and this is great. It’s being observed more often just how helpful games are these days, with obvious and glaring shiny textures, trails and waypoints leading you on your way. While there are some markers laid out by the police, there are also other clues for you to find on your own, some being pretty obscure, and others entirely miss-able. Once you have the key pieces (you don’t necessarily need to have every clue as long as you have the right ones), you get to come to a conclusion about the events that took place. Sometimes this is done automatically in the form of a flashback, other times you have to pick and choose the correct clues to make the right assumption, but be careful, you only get three guesses.

There is also the possibility to investigate and analyse certain items and scenes. Using your powers on disembodied hands and feet might reveal an imprint on the area that you can then focus on. Similar to how one might read a witness in LA Noire, you will read and interpret clues in this way to help make some headway in the current case.

There is a pretty big scope for side missions, whether they’re in the form of some random ghosts who need answers, or finding the hundreds of collectibles over the course of the game, some of which are linked to smaller ghost stories to listen to in a brief moment of respite. Despite playing the game almost non-stop and searching what I thought was probably every nook and cranny possible, I still didn’t find everything.

There are many NPC’s scattered all throughout the map, whom you can possess and read their minds. Most of them don’t offer anything in terms of narrative, though some of them are slightly funny. Something a little odd I noticed was how utterly stiffly upright everyone walked, as though walking with a stick up your arse was completely natural.

There are abilities you can use, apparently the skills you had in your life are amplified and strengthened in death. They will become absolutely necessary across the course of the game, from using poltergeist powers to distract people, possession to bypass certain areas, and removing or revealing items.

Something which slightly disappointed me was that using the poltergeist powers inspires almost no reaction at all in regular people. I think if I was standing near a coffee maker, and it suddenly started gushing hot coffee everywhere, I’d be making a kind of coffee of my own. In my pants. Given some of the more creepy or playful natures of the ghosts you encounter throughout the story, a bit of spooky trolling wouldn’t have gone amiss.

Main characters in the game are motion captured, adding a brilliant flourish of realism to their reactions, faces and behaviours. Such are the advances in motion capture now, it’s quite possible to forget you’re still only watching graphics. There were some little touches to them that I really appreciated, such as the fact that Ronan died smoking a cigarette, and therefore is perpetually smoking in the Dusk.

There aren’t really enemies as such, though there are demons. Bearing a striking narrative similarity to cie’th in Final Fantasy 13, demons were once ghosts who never finished resolving their unfinished business. Having lost their way, they then hunt down ghosts and suck their souls, much like a Dementor from Harry Potter.

Dotted around areas where demons are likely appear are ‘hiding spots’ which you can pop in and out of, jumping one to another to escape should you be hunted. Get behind the demon unnoticed, and you can execute it, performing a very quick QTE.

The storyline has incredible momentum, it’s like being on a roller-coaster you don’t WANT to stop. The narrative is so exciting, my feels took an absolute pounding in places, and the want to bring the compelling story to completion makes the game a somewhat short affair indeed. I played through the entire game in approximately ten hours, and that’s including taking time to complete side missions and finding as many collectibles as I could.

Though so much happens, the ten hours don’t feel stolen at all, in fact they were worth every second. Every moment was enjoyable. The games end was one of the most satisfying and rewarding completions I’d experienced in a very long time. Despite what some might consider to be a let down in gameplay time, I honestly think that if it were any longer, the storyline would have run out of energy and suffered greatly for it.

I had expected once the game was finished, I might be able to go back to a point before the last segment, in order to soak up the last few bits and pieces I had missed. Sadly this was not the case. As there is only one save file for the game and it constantly over-writes itself, if you didn’t collect everything before this last section, you will want to do so before you continue into the final phase.

The thing is, the storyline is so intense, the replay value doesn’t have immediate turn around. You’re not going to want to restart the game over so soon for the sake of re-finding everything from the start, as they don’t carry over.

By the time I’d finished the game, I’d mopped up 34/48 achievements. I’d collected almost everything in the game. Would I change anything about the game? Narrative wise, it’s perfection. Control wise, it’s absolutely fine. I just wish there was the option to go back and finish off side cases and collect things after the main game.

A game about justice over all, supernatural investigation, serial murder and love beyond the mortal realm, this is one of the most incredible story driven games I’ve played in recent years. With mechanic and gameplay similarities to LA Noire and even Dishonored in all the best ways, I couldn’t recommend this game more. I look forward to the memory of this game fading in my mind a little, so I can go back through it and appreciate it all over again.