Murdered: Soul Suspect Review
Sometimes the toughest thing in life for a detective of Salem is to solve his own murder, and how it fits in with a string of other killings occurring all over Salem. In Murdered: Soul Suspect you play the part of Ronan O’Connor, a man with a checkered past who cleans up his act to become a cop. Unfortunately because of your past you are always out to prove yourself, and so you decide to check on a tip on a killer that you’ve been hunting, but without backup. You survive, barely, the fall through the window to the road, but those bullets to the chest, from your own gun, should put you in the ground. In a strange turn of events your soul is stuck in this reality because of unfinished business, that business of course is trying to find out who killed you, or so you thought…
The game is basically broken up into investigations. You will have to solve one to continue the game. It is through these investigations that you will be given specific questions that you’ll have to collect nearby evidence to try to put the pieces together. For example if you walk into a room, your character will have a question, and you will then see a 0 out of some amount of clues that you need to collect. Once you have all of them, or you think you have enough you can try to put all the pieces together to advance the storyline. I’m going to be honest with you, this part of the game can be beyond frustrating because sometimes the clues are not really intuitive, or they require interacting with something that you have previously interacted with and all of a sudden another “piece of the puzzle” is there. I will say that I do like the fact that if you wander out of the “investigation area” you see that clue progress info disappears, which of course is your indication that you don’t need to look over in that area for this specific piece. Another thing that you can do to help out with your investigation is to possess people in the game. Now 9 out of 10 times you’re going to get a random thought from some bystander, but there are those characters out there that will give you a bit more, or you will be able to do more than just read their minds.
Outside of the main storyline are a series of mysteries for you to unravel by finding hidden clues in certain areas. When you find all of those clues, which you don’t have to collect, it will tell you of another mysterious murder that took place in your current area. The murder doesn’t have anything to do with the murders that you were investigating, but it does give a little bit more depth to the world that you’re interacting with. Speaking of areas, you are going to find that you have plenty of different areas to investigate as the game goes on, but sometimes trying to remember how to get to those areas will drive you up the wall. This game unfortunately doesn’t have a city map so that you can orient yourself with your surroundings. The city also has ghost remnants throughout, and what that means is that not only do you have to deal with the city as it is now, but there will be plenty of times where a ghost version of something, such as a wall, will be present and will block you from continuing on your current path. I think that most of my time in the game was probably running circles around the town trying to get to specific places and ending up turning around again. There is an indicator that tells you how far you are from your objective, but that distance is wrong most of the time as it will reset and give you a different distance when you think that you’ve finally arrived at your destination.
One of the biggest hurdles that you’ll face in the game are the demons. They are these nasty floating spectres that will try to suck your soul away. Since you are basically all soul now, that’s a problem. What you’ll have to do is find ways to lose the demons, and then find a way to get behind them so that you can pull their souls out and vanquish them, just be careful, if they see you you have to run. There are also these demon pits that will appear throughout the game. They are areas that you cannot get by without the help of possessing a character, or perhaps a different route has to be taken.
At the end of the day I’m on the fence about this game. There’s definitely something to it that makes it enjoyable, but there’s also plenty that drives me insane. When the story was progressing it was a solid story full of twists and turns, but when you find yourself having to go over an investigation area over and over again for that final clue, or you spend 20 minutes trying to get somewhere in the city, the enjoyment factor goes down. I wish that the developer would take the good in this game and try again, and of course iron out all the strenuous little things that killed the flow of the game.