I came across something midway through Murdered: Soul Suspect that summed up the majority of my experience playing this game. I was strolling through a police station as Ronan OâConnor, a detective so hard-boiled that his own death could not stop him from hunting down the notorious murderer as The Bell Killer. The game begins with OâConnor being killed by that very serial killer, so the hunt has taken a turn for the personal by the time the player steps into Ronanâs shoes.
During a trip downstairs at the station, I happened upon my own corpse. This was an opportunity for real emotional drama in a game that first opens with the untimely and tragic death of Ronanâs wife before showing OâConnor himself getting the axe a moment later. Not only that, it posed an introspective, almost philosophical dilemma about who or what youâre playing as in a video game about the burden of immortality.
Most games let you behave as if youâre immortal. Few are bold enough to turn this into a dramatic conceit. So how did Murdered: Soul Suspect have Ronan respond to witnessing his own nonbeing? He said nothing.
Actually, thatâs not entirely true. Ronan doesnât âsayâ anything, but he technically writes something. I just had to dig for it in the notes after an alert popped up telling me that Iâd seen my own physical remains.
âNothing can prepare you for that,â Ronan wrote there. âFor seeing your own corpse. It never felt so much like an empty shell until now. God, I look like a criminal.â
Murdered is a game with strong inspirations in film noire and horror movies of all shapes and sizes, so there are plenty of cinematic cutaways here. I imagine in an alternate version, Ronanâs encounter with his own flesh and blood might have been handled differently. Maybe the camera would be pulled away from the playerâs control to focus on his ghostly visage as he stared aghast at what lay before him.
Instead, the actual, lived moment in the morgue delivers nothing close to that emotional tone. When you encounter the body, his body, Ronan remains entirely impassive. You can linger over yourâŠself as long as you want, but the orderlies attending to the corpses in the police stationâs dead person wing wonât say anything either. Eventually, if you want to finish Soul Suspect, youâll have to walk back upstairs, where a good percentage of the computers in the same police station are illuminated with loading screens for Deus Ex: Human Revolution for some reason.
If I were a middle school English teacher, Iâd call this a textbook example of âshow, donât tell.â Iâm not, and weâre not talking about a book here anyways. But itâs the same basic problem, and the one that plagues all of the mysteriesâmurder-themed or otherwiseâin Soul Suspect. The game offers up oodles of traumatic scenarios. But it almost never lets you play through them in any provocative or meaningful way. By the end of the gameâs relatively short single player campaign, I felt like Ronan says he did in that moment in the police station: staring down at the empty shell of something that could have turned out much better.
Iâm not really sure what to call Murdered: Soul Suspect genre-wise, so Iâll just say itâs an adventure game. A serial killer plot set in a modern-day-ish version of Salem, Massachusetts, the game mixes occult phenomenon with procedural police drama in manner akin to Seven or True Detectiveâthe main difference being the ghosts are real in this story
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zkh1NP5TBQI
Itâs similar in tone and style to a game like LA Noire or Heavy Rain if one or both of those was thrown into a blender with Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver. The game centers around Ronanâs mission to uncover the true identity of the Bell Killer, the twist being that youâre dead so you canât indulge in the same interrogation tactics as Cole Phelps does in LA Noire or the fast-paced fighting and fleeing in Heavy Rain
You still have to do a similar kind of environment-based puzzle solving as seen in both those games, however. Ronanâs ghostly status just gives him access to a different set of abilities and limitations. Heâs invisible to most people, and can walk through physical barriers such as walls and furniture. The majority of humans in the game can be possessed, giving you an ability to eavesdrop on their conversations or their innermost thoughts. You can also manipulate the people youâre inhabiting to trigger relevant memories or sometimes make them do thingsâbut never anything more significant than, say, moving a pile of papers so you can analyze a photograph for clues.
Oh, and you can possess cats too. Thatâs probably my favorite part of the game. Because, I mean, theyâre cats. Just look at the kitty go!
The sad part about that is: Iâm not actually joking. The feline-centric levels in this game honestly stand out as of its most dynamic sections. Partly thatâs because the cat is a more nimble beast than a human beingâliving or otherwise. But itâs also a sign of just how restrictive most of Soul Suspectâs world feels.
Murderedâs gameplay is broken up into a few separate chunks. The first involves walking around the world. This is a harder process than you might thinkâand not really in a good way. Ronan is a restless soul, which means heâs tasty prey for gangs of roving demons that pop up from time to time. These are toothy, caped beasts that suck the life out of Ronan in short order once they see him. If you sneak up behind them, however, you can give them the same treatment.
Thatâs obstacle number one. Number two is another demonic scourge: this one in the form of little volcanic mounds that occasionally block your way. If you try to walk over one, a series of ash-colored arms will clutch at your legs and drag you down towards hell. I called these âfloor demonsâ for no better reason than the fact that theyâre demons coming out the floor. Theyâre usually deposited in neat little squares right in front of some place youâre trying to go, which gives a good opportunity for some puzzle solving.
This leads to the third obstacle. Theyâre called âdusk objects,â and theyâre essentially an undead version of the same walls and furniture that populate modern-day Salem. Only difference is, you canât pass through them.
I take it that these threes types of barriers were put into the game to make traversing the world more challenging, and thus more interesting. The problem is, none of them are all that difficultâat least in any compelling way. From the beginning of the game, for instance, you can toggle a sort of stealth-vision mode that lets you see exactly where demons are and in what direction their cone of vision is pointing. As far as I could tell, they never get stronger or more formidable as Soul Suspect progresses either.
I realized within seconds of encountering my first demon, therefore, that all I had to do was stand behind a wall and wait for them to turn the other direction. Once they did, I could walk through that same wall and kill them. Or whatever the hell youâre doing to them is called. Either way, itâs very easy to make the bad guys in this game go away.
Similarly, every time I saw a floor demon, there was alwaysâalwaysâan immediately apparent way bypass it. Usually, the solution involved using a âpoltergeistâ action to set off some electronic device, make a living person standing on the other side cross over the floor demon to, say, turn off the vacuum cleaner you just switched on with your otherworldly powers, and possess them so they can transport you across the noxious bit of floor unharmed.
A good puzzle is meant to present itself to you gradually, making the act of discovering its solution the fun part. The levels in Murdered: Soul Suspect arenât like this. They feel less like intriguing mazes to be wound through cautiously, and more like mousetraps you want to get out of as soon as possible.
This just gets worse in the mystery-solving portion of Soul Suspect, which is the other main chunk of its gameplay. Once you manage to find your way to one of the gameâs many crime scenes in need of investigating, youâre challenged with walking Ronan around a tiny space in search of clues. Since many of these are full-blown crime scenes with real-life policemen milling around, the clues for which you have to search are often highlighted with police tape or little yellow evidence markers.
Once youâve found enough, you press a button (triangle for the DualShock 4) to go into a sort of analysis mode where you have to sift through all the available clues and select the ones that are most relevant to the question at hand. Unlike a game like Heavy Rain or LA Noire, however, thereâs no real consequence for failing to do so effectively or efficiently. If you donât get it right on the first try, your score for the puzzle goes down (itâs rated on a one-to-three scale marked with little detective shields that disappear when you get a wrong answer). But it also crosses out the wrong answer definitively each time you mess up, meaning youâre always eventually going to end up with the ârightâ choice.
Again, this ends up feeling more like an endurance test than an actual intellectual challenge. Or an emotional one, because this is a horror game after all. But at its worst moments, these puzzles are something worse than repetitive or easy. Oftentimes, Soul Suspect prompted me with questions that left me thinking: âWow, this game really doesnât respect my intelligence.â
During one crime scene late in the game, for instance, I walked up to inspect a mangled corpse that was stuck underneath a giant rock. Looking down at the body and pressing the âinvestigateâ button, I was greeted with an onscreen message asking how I thought the person died. I really, really donât know how one would end up choosing anything other than âcrushed by a giant rock.â
Ok, maybe saying that the game doesnât respect the intelligence of its players isnât fair. But no matter how I look at it, thereâs something disquieting to the blandness of Murdered: Soul Suspect. Itâs a game about ghosts, demons, and the Salem witch trials. For a story thatâs on some level interested in scaring its players, it never has the courage to let those same players make their own mistakes.
This is frustrating, because there are some intriguing ideas at play here. Ronanâs life as a ghost is one of the most frank attempts Iâve seen from a game developer to take the ability to pass through walls from its origin as a cheat code in early first-person games and turn it into a viable type of gameplay of its own.
The social dynamics at play between Ronan and the gameâs other charactersâmost of whom are still aliveâare also interesting. Thereâs a real potential for terror in scenes where OâConnor is stuck powerless to intervene in the events of the living that unfold before him.
The game doesnât do much with any of this potential, however. So if youâre in the mood for a tense, murder-driven adventure game, I would just recommend dusting off a copy of something like Heavy Rain instead.
Actually, now that I think about it, Iâm sort of jealous of all the people in Salemâs police station who had copies of Deus Ex: Human Revolution installed on their desktops. Maybe Iâll go play that instead.
I couldnât walk through walls in that game, I guess. But contorting myself through the the vents in that game was a lot more fun anyway.
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