Murdered: Soul Suspect is a bland investigation game – which is surprising, given that the premise of playing a ghost trying to hunt down his own murderer is, at least, not a bad idea.
You play as Ronan, a formered Tattooed Criminal turned cop, who ends up getting murdered by the Bell Killer, a serial killer who is hunting down young women in Salem, Massachusettes. Given the game’s constant mention of the town’s history, you might imagine this is in some way related to the infamous witch trials, doubly so as the now-ghostly Ronan quickly runs into a creepy girl with supernatural abilities who teaches you how to be a ghost (and then leaves ahead of some creepy demon hands popping up out of the ground – a barrier that will stop you from progressing a few times throughout the game).
You are soon introduced to Joy, a spirit medium who can actually see the otherwise invisible ghost world, which is important, as Ronan cannot interfere with the mortal world in any way. But he wants to track down that killer, so that he can resolve his unfinished business.
The gameplay really consists of three major elements – wandering around the environment and examining objects to add clues to your journal, stealth sections where you have to creep up behind “demons” (shrouded ghosts – they’re all identical throughout the game) to exorcise them, and a couple sections where you have to help a spirit medium sneak through areas by distracting people and taking out cameras with your poltergeist powers (via pressing a button while next to them to set things off).
Unfortunately, all of these things are extremely shallow. The “investigations” are basically “wander around until you find some environmental object that you can press a button to collect”, with the odd “pick the clue” bit which is generally very obvious (and mostly, TOO obvious, as rather than trying to piece together clues, you pretty much just pick the most obvious option every time – these things almost never involve any real thought). Worse, outside of the investigations, pretty much all of the gameplay also consists of wandering around and maybe examining collectibles to collect them, which approximately doubles the game’s gameplay time if you do so – which is quite brief.
The stealth segments are incredibly shallow – you can just press a button to watch the demons through the walls, and then you run up behind them (you don’t make sound) and press the button to exorcise them. If they turn around and see you, you have to run off and teleport between ghost residue in the environment to turn them off your trail – something you have to do every time they see you, but which is exactly the same every time it happens. These sequences serve to try and break up the investigation and add some sense of danger, but they’re really not very interesting, and the extremely simple gameplay doesn’t help.
The “accompanying someone around” segments seem like a neat idea, but in practice, they’re all incredibly bland – the fact that you’re totally invisible means that all these segments consist of is finding some environmental object (that generally glows), then walk up next to it and push a button to distract the people (or disable the camera). There’s no real timing or finesse required, and no actual level of cleverness is required.
And this is really the problem with the game in general – it is all very perfunctory and superficial. The game itself is quite short (MAYBE 6 hours to beat the main story if you ignore the collectibles, twice that if you try to hunt down every single collectible), the characters not particularly interesting and fairly generic (and rather thick-seeming, as it takes them ages to piece together some fairly obvious clues), the plot only marginally original, and the gameplay quite bland and dull.
The thing is, because the game is short, it doesn’t really wear too much, but after playing a couple missions, I’d often have to take a break because it just wasn’t interesting enough. I really only kept playing it because I’m a completionist; I should have just put down the game after the first couple missions.
In the end, I can’t see much value in this game. As a detective/mystery game, it isn’t very good, but as anything else, it isn’t very good either. All in all, despite its short length, I’d still say it isn’t worth your time, let alone your money. It isn’t the worst thing I’ve ever played, but looking back, I think there was maybe two points during the whole game – one at the beginning, and one at the end – where I felt any real sense of joy. Otherwise, it was just going through the motions.
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