Murdered: Soul Suspect review

I want to like Ronan O'Connor, I really do. He has a shady past and he certainly made a handful of wrong choices in his lifetime, but who hasn't? He makes up for his lack of compassion with a willingness to get the job done, even if he has to break the rules to do so, but maybe that's just what you need to be a good cop these days? Plus he wears a cool hat.

However Ronan has flaws, and the same could be said of Murdered: Soul Suspect as a whole. I want to like it; I want to become fully immersed in this ghostly world that Airtight Games has created, full of spirits and some interesting lore. But there are just a few key things letting it down - crucially in the detective department that the whole game is built upon - that stop me from doing so.

Let's start from the beginning. Ronan is dead. Within the first few minutes of the game loading up he'll be falling from a window, defeated by a hooded figure who watches on nonchalantly. However being dead in Murdered: Soul Suspect is just the beginning, and before long you'll discover that Ronan is stuck in the city of Salam as a ghostly entity until he can solve the mystery of his own murder and move on to join his deceased wife in the afterlife.

It's certainly an interesting premise, but before long you'll see just what's wrong with it. For one, Ronan can't walk through every wall or object in the world as you'd imagine he would. These strange rules mean you have to wait until the door to a building is open before you can go inside, or climb through a window or whatever else. Once inside you can pretty much wander where you wish but getting your head round this rule takes some getting used to. So much for being a ghost.

However that's a lightweight problem compared to this: There's no way you can fail at investigations. When examining different crime scenes you'll have to find a bunch of clues, and when you've found enough of them you can attempt to "solve" whatever mystery you're working on at that time by piecing them together. It's simple and enjoyable enough, but there's no punishment for piecing the wrong clues together. You just try again, and again, and again, until you come up with the right answer. This just leads to a game of trial and error instead of feeling any satisfaction for "solving" an investigation.

Likewise, there's a lot of dialogue in Murdered: Soul Suspect, and you'll be speaking with other ghosts as well as human sidekick and medium Joy. Joy is a very useful partner to have because she can get you into buildings and talk to other humans to gain new information, and the relationship between her and Ronan is interesting to see. They don't really like each other much, but they need each other, and that's the only reason they persevere with things. But the dialogue also follows a strict framework and you can't seem to do any wrong.

I'm not expecting anything like Telltale's The Walking Dead series, where your choices and things you say dramatically alter your experience. But it would be nice if there were a few branching narratives or even just a few different reactions if you chose to say certain things. As such you just select a few lines from a list, one by one, and go through the motions. I didn't feel like much of a detective.

There are definitely a few fun things though, and one of my favourites was the ability to possess any human you like. Once possessed, you can read their minds, use their eyes to look at important documents or influence them to remind them about something important. Jumping from human to human and mind reading gets old when you realise hardly any NPC in the game has anything of interest locked in their heads, but it's still a fun novelty nonetheless. Oh, and you can possess a cat a few times. That's also fun.

Ronan can also use a 'Poltergeist' ability to switch TVs on and off, mess with cameras, cause phones to ring, etc. This creates a distraction and allows Joy to sneak into areas she otherwise wouldn't be able to get to, however if the distraction isn't made within the context of the gameplay then no NPC will even notice the printer nearby has just shot 20 pieces of paper into the air, which is a shame.

Murdered remains very, very slow-paced throughout, which is fine for a detective game, but Airtight tries to inject some pacing with the addition of demons. These demons patrol hallways, alleyways, generally anywhere you might have to walk through, in search of ghostly souls to collect. You can either time things right to avoid the demons altogether, or sneak up behind and destroy them. Sneaking means you'll have to be stealthy and work out their patrol routes, taking them on means you'll have to be quick when their back is turned.

Demons do speed up the heart rate a little bit and force you into moving your fingers a little bit faster, but they seem slightly needless and forced. If a demon spots you he'll chase after you, and you'll have to hide for a short duration before they go away again. It's not too tricky, and if you die it'll be more down to a lack of concentration than skills. Did demons really need to be in this game? Almost definitely not.

The world of Salam is an interesting one: It's dark, a little bit dirty and you can tell there are a ton of secrets locked away here. You can find out more about the city by picking up collectibles scattered around the world, and there're also collectibles that reveal more about Ronan's past, too. Unlike most games I actually found myself interested in these little nuggets of information, I wanted to see just why Ronan was like Ronan. The game's story will take you through several locations including a police station, a cemetery and a mental hospital, and I can genuinely say each new setting had me intrigued.

There's a lot of potential in Murdered: Soul Suspect. Using your brain and solving cases in a game where you are never once asked to shoot a gun is extremely refreshing, but unfortunately this is more about trial-and-error than feeling like a real detective. The ability to fail or even do worse at solving cases would be nice, as would the chance for you to ask integral questions to progress. Even so, Murdered remains an enjoyable game if you can see through the flaws.