Murdered: Soul Suspect tells the story of Ronan O’Connor, a man that is so addicted to cigarettes that even his ghost smokes. While chasing a serial murderer known as the Bell Killer, Ronan gets into an altercation which results in his death. He must now solve the mystery of who the killer is so that he can move on and enjoy the rest of his afterlife in peace. This set up might sound intriguing, but unfortunately some of the design decisions and the way the story is handled make for a very underwhelming experience.
The first lesson I learned from Murdered: Soul Suspect is that if you are going to write a super natural mystery, don’t set it in Salem, Massachusetts. Doing so is a lose-lose proposition. If you do something with the infamous witch trials, then it is really easy to see it coming a mile away, because why else would you set in Salem. If you do play against type and you do not make it about the Salem witch trials, then I’d be disappointed because why else would you set in Salem? To make matters worse, you will probably unravel the mystery pretty early on, which means you are left to follow Ronan as he investigates and slowly comes to the realization you’ve already had. It is a little unfair, of course, after all Ronan doesn’t know that he is in a murder mystery but the player does, and it is easy to lose your patience as you watch Ronan struggle with things you figured out hours ago.
Magnetic Personalities
It would help if Ronan was likable, but he isn’t. He isn’t even much of a character really, more like a combination of things many felt a popular main character should have. Ronan is a hardboiled detective who for some reason wears a vest and fedora, and jeans. He is also covered in prison tattoos, because he is an ex-con. How did such a man become a detective? Turns out that his brother in law is a cop, and so he “buried his record” to get him a job. In my (extensive) experience a con sleeping with a cop’s sister doesn’t turn out that way. Despite all this confusing and some would say contradicting characterizations that Ronan has, there just isn’t much to him. Being an ex-con never really comes up, except in the intro where they show the events that inspired his bad-ass tattoos. He behaves pretty much like you would expect a straight cop to behave. You can find pieces of his memories as you wander through Salem, but most of them are logs, and after a while you lose interest. A huge number of them are memories of his wife, who got killed prior to the game beginning and just exists to give Ronan even more motivation to try to escape limbo. Apparently finding who killed him and not exploring Salem as a ghost forever were not enough motivation. Snark aside, I wish they would have left her alone. Maybe seeing someone grieve Ronan would have brought some humanity to a character that feels designed specifically to look cool without a lot of personality in mind.
You’ll be seeing him a lot.
The supporting cast isn’t much better. There are the usual characters in these types of stories, the ghost victims, the officer that hated Ronan, his brother in law who has his back, etc… there isn’t much to say about them save that they are painfully generic. I do wish to spend some extra time on the game’s second biggest character: Joy. Unlike Ronan, Joy is brimming with personality and attitude, but it is a personality that we have seen in so many games and movies before, that she just seems like a composite of every punky sassy teenage sidekick the developers have seen. But naturally she is also a medium because Ronan needs some way to interact with the living world. This might have been an interesting angle, but as with every other trope and stereotype in the game, she is used in a way that is boring and generic. The worse use they find for her are sections where you have to help her sneak through a specific area, using Ronan’s poltergeist powers to distract enemies. These are a mix of an escort quest and a stealth section. They are not very interesting and all it really boils down to is good timing, and finding the right appliance to trigger to distract the correct enemy.
This is not the only instance in which stealth sections are awkwardly wedged into the game. Roaming the un-death in which Ronan finds himself trapped are demons. Demons feed on ghosts or absorb their essence… or something. It doesn’t really matter what the excuse is, what matters is that in practice, they must be avoided by Ronan. He cannot fight them, rather, he must hide on the imprints left by other spirits and either run away, or do a stealth kill to destroy them. They don’t necessarily serve any purpose or seem to fit with the rest of the game in any way. It really makes me wonder why the developers felt that this game needed this element, except that they needed a way to lengthen a short game. There is no other reason for this, or for the hub area that connects all the story bits. It serve no purpose other than to have you walk from one point to another, gathering collectibles that reward you with creepy-pasta caliber horror stories when you find all of them.
The gameplay is at its best when you are in the investigation sequences. A question hovers above the investigation area, and you move around gathering clues and looking at the crime scene, which unlocks deductions. Once you’ve gathered enough evidence, you can try to attempt to find the answer. It is not necessary to get all of the clues to try to solve the answer the question, and there is no negative consequence for guessing incorrectly. This could lead to just abusing this whenever you get a new piece of evidence, but the truth is that the game is not that hard. Many times you already know the answer before you even start looking, and even when you don’t the puzzles are easy. Aside from the main story line investigations, there are also lost souls you find as you traverse from one end of the map to the other from story segment to story segment. These usually involve telling someone who is desperate how or why they died so that they can find closure and move on. It is one of the better parts of the game, but they seem to suffer from glitches, as these lost souls sometimes re spawn once you solve their cases. The difference is the second time you cannot interact with them at all. It is a bit jarring to see the woman you just helped move on weeping after you finish a mission.
You can also possess cats. That’s a plus for some people.
Murdered: Soul Suspect is a great concept with some terrible execution. The story is mediocre, the puzzles are easy, it has horrible stealth sections, and the characters are painfully formulaic. In the time it took me to write this review, Airtight Games has closed its doors. It is never good to see people lose their job, but considering the quality of this game it is not surprising that it didn’t sell very well. We of course wish the best of luck to all the developers and hopefully they will be able to land good jobs somewhere else, I hear Volition is hiring.
In the next few months you are likely to see this game on sale a lot, and you may try to convince yourself “It can’t be that bad, I’m sure its worth this much” but it isn’t. I don’t care how low the price is, Murdered: Soul Suspect isn’t even the catastrophic kind of bad that makes playing it an interesting conversation piece. You get little time to waste on this earth, don’t spend it on Murdered, unless you want to stay stuck in limbo with your soul hat and soul cigarettes trying to get the living to stop playing bad games until you are cleared to move on.
