Murdered: Soul Suspect Review
Murdered: Soul Suspect Review
Murdered: Soul Suspect allows you to carry out a winding investigation into your own murder – it’s an interesting prospect but does the game conclude with a satisfying result or is it frustrating enough to make you want to commit a murder?
Murdered: Soul Suspect is an interesting idea, allowing you to solve the mystery behind your own murder from the safety of a realm between life and death where humans are trapped until all ties are severed with their old lives, any issues are resolved and the deceased has let go of any regrets or what ifs left from their past life.
The investigation takes place with players taking control of lead-character Ronan; a dead cop with a criminal back story. The town of Salem is explored from a third person perspective as you try to piece together what little information you can find relating to your death in order to solve the crime with a little help from teen medium Joy, who has a shared interest with Ronan in that she’s looking to find her mother, who got mixed up in previous police investigations surrounding the same Bell Killer. There’s a mix investigatory gameplay, stealth elements and very little free roaming exploration.
The investigatory gameplay largely revolves around Ronan examining a crime scene for clues and evidence, piecing together flashbacks, items and the thoughts of characters in order to reach a conclusion for each “case” before taking the information gleaned from each crime scene and moving on. The investigations require little thought and offer little challenge for the most part.
The investigations work in a similar manner to most point and click games; look at and interact with everything you can until you’ve cleared the entire area of points of interest. The toughest part of the investigations is the conclusion you must draw at the end of each, selecting the most relevant information; these can range from shockingly easy to completely illogical. They offer no consistency and often result in guesswork to complete.
The stealth gameplay in Murdered: Soul Suspect revolves around Ronan avoiding the demons that also inhabit the realm between others. More often that not in the stealth moments of the game, it’s a case of watching the demons movement patterns thanks to a handy ‘ability’ that allows you to track them through walls, before sneaking up directly behind them and performing an execution. Unfortunately it’s rarely challenging and feels more like filler mechanics to pad the game out a little, rather than a fully explored gameplay idea.
Occasionally the stealth sections will revolve around Ronan guiding Joy past police or other patrolling parties in order to sneak in and out of restricted areas. These sections are a little more interesting as timing becomes increasingly important, but again, there’s very little challenge on offer. It’s regularly a case of using Ronan’s poltergeist ability to set off a phone, printer or coffee machine that’s directly in front of the person you’re looking to move out of the way. Even if you do pick the wrong object to use and the patrolling guard doesn’t move, nothing happens; the guard disappointingly stands there patiently waiting for you to find the relevant object to trigger.
You can explore Salem between each main investigation to some degree of freedom, although it often feels like the game is ushering you back to the story with blocked roads and impassable walls. There are a few side investigations where Ronan can help fellow spirits resolve issues as well as a whole stack of collectibles, although the collectibles are largely irrelevant – there’s a whole stack of diary notes from Ronan’s wife that loosely details Ronan’s back story, but they’re so bland and irrelevant the chances are you won’t care, never mind actively seek them out.
Graphically, Murdered: Soul Suspect suffers on next generation consoles due to cross generation development, although even on the PS3 and Xbox 360, the game is far from competing for the crown of best looking game. There’s a ton of odd graphical moments in Murdered; non playable characters walking through walls was possibly the most frustrating and immersion breaking moment killing off what little effort Murdered offered in making the town of Salem feel alive.
Another issue I witnessed more than once during my play through with Murdered: Soul Suspect was with hiding spots. You’re supposed to be able to hide from demons during the stealth sections in designated hide spots, although I witnessed an issue where the spots weren’t where they were supposed to be at all, and another where they were there but invisible; if you didn’t know where to look, you simply wouldn’t find them and they’re imperative to the game mechanics – it was a serious playability issue.
Lip syncing is another huge issue that just can’t be forgiven in modern gaming. It would appear that developer Airtight Games made absolutely no effort to lip sync with audio at all. In a game that focuses heavy on the narrative and relies on suspense to provide an immersive story driven experience, having a characters lips move so obviously out of sync with their speech ruins any atmosphere that the game manages to build and is simply poor, even by last generation standards.
It might sound like I’m being extremely critical of the game, and I am, but that’s only because I’m frustrated that the potential was there for the game to be substantially better. Somewhere along the way Murdered: Soul Suspect was shaping up to be a great game, but became a confused mash-up of disjointed elements. The story is worth experiencing, even if the ending is largely underwhelming, but proceed with care and expect to encounter technical issues. The interesting but clichéd dynamic between Ronan and Joy is fun to watch and helps develop both characters a little, but ultimately offers little substantial.
It’s disappointing that Murdered: Soul Suspect ended up the way it did – it genuinely has an interesting premise, location and some innovative ideas but ultimately it doesn’t gel together to form a complete, coherent experience.