Murdered: Soul Suspect

Game is incredibly boring and repetitive and the voice acting is subpar. i'd only get this when it is in on extreme discount sale, otherwise avoid it.

This is a game to play for the story, and not really the gameplay. It’s a detective game with a supernatural twist, you are a ghost. I didn’t find it particularly scary, but it had a creepy atmosphere. Spectres stare at you from a distance and wink out of existence as you approach. Ghostly graffiti daubs the walls. The design of the demons is very well done too. In terms of negatives, there are a number. The basic gameplay is simple, with most of it being exploration to pick up notes or other things of interest, and very simple detective gameplay. This normally consists of finding clues in the environment, interacting with them and then making deductions or connections. These are selected from multiple choice. The game appears to give you 3 attempts before failing these, I literally never failed one as they were all simple. Still, I did enjoy the detective gameplay, even if simple, as it propelled the story forward. You run around the town of Salem and various different areas. Amusingly there are some not very well explained rules about consecrated buildings and “ghost walls” to explain why you can’t just walk through everything since you are non corporeal. There is combat and stealth though, and by God is it awful. You have to hide from demons via a very basic stealth system, with hiding spots and basic breaking line of site. You then run up behind the demons to banish them, by way of a quick time event. If you fail it or get caught then you have to have another round of crappy stealth to hid from them, or die and get thrown back to a checkpoint. Fortunately combat/stealth is not the main focus of the game, and in later encounters I was able to run past the demons without much fuss to bypass most of the encounter. Graphically it’s not brilliant, but not terrible for a game from 2014. As mentioned it has a good atmosphere, which really helps sell the game. It ran fine for me at 120 frames on 4k (on a 4090 not surprising). Unfortunately all the cutscenes and many of the dialogue sections are locked at 30 frames, and the cutscenes are all rendered at what appears to be 720p, and there are a lot of them, so they look worse than the gameplay. This is an issue that plagues many games from this era. Some like Mass Effect have modders that work to upscale the cutscenes, but Soul Suspect being a rather forgotten game, no such option exists here. Storyline wise then, it’s not revolutionary, and fairly cliched, but I enjoyed it still, with the aforementioned atmosphere and some good twists and turns. The main character, Ronan, is a cliché, with a criminal past (somehow rather implausibly his brother in law seems to have snuck him on the force), loads of tattoos and a dead wife. He comes across as a bit thick, and I anticipated some of the twists before it became obvious to him but he is a likeable enough main character. The other characters are interesting or likeable enough, such as the teenage medium Ronan has to team up with to solve the case. There aren’t any choices to make in the game, you propel the story forward in a linear fashion and it’s fairly short, taking me around 11 and a half hours to complete the story and pick up most of the notes and collectibles. I did enjoy my time with the game, despite it’s many flaws, as to it’s credit the focus really is the story. If it sounds interesting and you can look past the flaws, I would recommend it when it’s on sale.