Cracking Ace

Murdered: Soul Suspect
PS4
Also available on: PC, PS3, X360, XO
Released 6/6/2014

5/10

‘Murdered: Soul Suspect’ is a supernatural detective thriller from Square Enix and Airtight Games following in the footsteps of titles like ‘Heavy Rain’ and ‘Alan Wake’, focusing on a more story-driven, thinking persons game-play experience.

If you’re an action loving player, this one is definitely not going to impress. ‘Murdered: Soul Suspect’ eases you in to the very simple format, introducing you to the controls, the story, and the main characters at a pace that lets you know there is no need to rush. At first, it feels as though it takes a while for the game to get going, but if it’s intensity you’re after, it doesn’t push you much harder later either. There is an element of danger introduced in the shape of demons, but it feels almost tacked on to break up the more interesting detective work.

You play as Ronan O’Connor, ex-con turned police detective on the trail of a serial murderer known as the Bell Killer. Much like the Origami Killer of ‘Heavy Rain’, this guy has a string of mysterious kills to his name, each time leaving his calling card. At the opening of the game, Ronan becomes the killer’s latest victim and wakes up to find his body laying dead next to him. He learns from a helpful ghost girl named Abigail that he is dead and unable to move on to the next life until he has settled his unfinished business.

Ronan realises that in order to move on and reunite with his dead wife in the afterlife, he will have to solve the case and find out who the Bell Killer is. As a detective in life, his new ghost skills in death reflect his strengths. He becomes able to read objects and affect people’s minds in order to learn information. As well as these more unique abilities, he learns a few other spiritual tricks such as walking through walls and possession. These skills come at a cost though, as the dead are unable to communicate with the living.

The game is a free roamer, but the story drives you to follow a set path in a similar way to ‘Arkham City’. You can at any time explore the town of Salem, but you feel little need to when the story and mystery is driving you to your next location. Your movements are also limited by consecrated walls and buildings that have been blessed in order to stop spirits from getting through. An open door or window solves the problem for you, but often they only become available when the story requires it.

The main reason you might want to explore is for the many collectibles hidden around the town. You can find information on the killer, yourself and your past, your deceased wife, your friends and colleagues as well as the town itself and even uncover a few local ghost stories. You will also meet a few other people whose lives recently ended and be able to help them solve their own problem and find a way to move on to the next life.

The main thrust of the game is the detective work. On finding a crime scene, Ronan will have to search around the area and find clues to help him figure out what went on. He can question people, influence the minds of the living, focus on objects to learn their secrets, and reconstruct memories to piece together the puzzles. This is made relatively easy as you don’t usually need to get too close to a clue before a prompt lets you know it’s there. You will often have to then pick out what the most relevant information is to correctly solve the case. This is one of the places that the game has a slight problem. Though you are meant to select the relevant clues and sometimes in a certain order, in a few places it feels more of a game of ‘guessing what was in the game designer’s head’, especially when the questions aren’t always clear about what they want from you. You are graded on your detective work with three cop badges. Choose correctly first time, you get three out of three. For each wrong guess, you lose a badge.

Every so often, the sleuthing will be interrupted with some demon hunting. Though they are hunting for spirits to devour, you have to turn the tables on them. Abigail early on explains that demons are spirits who took too long to figure out why they hadn’t moved on. Now they only exist to eat newer ghosts. These stealthy, assassination sections remind you a little of the clicker sequences in ‘The Last of Us’. You have to keep out of the way, while the horrific, creepy creature blindly looks for its prey (you) and find a method of killing it. However, the tension in this game is much lower as the demons seem a lot less threatening than the zombies in the other game. Though the demons are lethal if they catch you, they are a lot easier to avoid, they move in a predictable pattern, and you don’t need any special equipment to deal with them. As long as Ronan sneaks up on them from behind, he can execute them with relative ease. He also has the added bonus of being able to see the demons through walls and hide in ghostly residue if he gets into trouble. As mentioned, these sections feel a little tacked on just to break up the routine gum-shoeing.

It’s unfortunate that the game didn’t live up to its potential. Deep stories and interesting characters will keep people interested in games even if there isn’t a huge amount of action, but even that came up short. The tale in ‘Soul Suspect’ is gripping enough to have you see it through to the end – although the game is disappointingly short anyway – but with only a small number of characters and suspects introduced, the ending becomes quite predictable. With a few hiccups in the gaming experience itself, there’s not much to love about the game, but being able to possess and run about as a cat is arguably a highlight.

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