Tag: Murdered: Soul Suspect

1609: In Custody

Finished Murdered: Soul Suspect this evening. It’s not a long game, which may cause consternation among some people wondering whether to splash their hard-earned cash on it, but I found it didn’t outstay its welcome, and it was an eminently satisfying experience. (I am also of the age when I remember paying £30-40 for titles like Resident Evil and Silent Hill, which are about 2-3 hours long apiece, so I don’t mind too much when something clocks in at 10 hours or less. In fact, given the number of absolute behemoths I play on a regular basis, it can be quite refreshing to play something short.)

I won’t spoil the story here, but I was pleased to see that it didn’t end up being quite as predictable as I initially believed it would be. Those with a better mind for this sort of thing than I — I’m thinking mainly of my friend Lynette here, who can spot a plot twist coming a mile off, however well the author might have obfuscated it — may still find it to be predictable, but I found that there were a few interesting surprises along the way, and the conclusion was satisfying and, well, conclusive.

I stand very much by my feeling that it had the atmosphere of a 1990s PC game, and I’ve been trying to figure out quite what I mean by that. It’s a combination of things, I think: the use of “real world” settings with various obstacles in the way so they don’t end up having to render the entire interior of a building; the way that NPCs sort of mill around and occasionally have conversations with one another that occasionally give you little hints about the plot; collectible bits and pieces that help flesh out the world; and gameplay that is less concerned about being overly “cinematic” or based on spectacle than it is about using its mechanics to make the player feel involved in what is going on.

It is not a hard game, and since the protagonist is already dead at the outset, there are relatively few situations in which you find yourself in peril, making it a mostly fairly cerebral experience. Even the few instances in which you find yourself threatened by angry spirits (known in the game as demons) are more environmental puzzles than fast-action combat — you don’t actually “fight” the demons as such; instead, the only way to defeat them is to sneak up behind them and “execute” them. Alternatively, in pretty much any situation where you’re threatened by them, you can just sneak past, too, which is nice.

This latter aspect of the game called to mind a slightly more recent game: Silent Hill: Shatered Memories, a retelling of the first Silent Hill game that replaced the PS1-era “survival horror” gameplay with something a bit different, a bit more modern, and entirely combat-free. In Shattered Memories, the most you can do with the monsters that inhabit the dark world of Silent Hill is to block their path with something heavy — for the most part, you’re simply fleeing from them, attempting to make your way back to the exit as quickly as possible. Murdered: Soul Suspect isn’t quite that non-violent — you can defeat the demons through the aforementioned sneak attacks, after all — but playing a game that doesn’t have a straight “attack” button that causes you to flail wildly at enemies is always a pleasant surprise.

It may sound contradictory to compare Murdered: Soul Suspect to late-’90s PC games and Shattered Memories, a title I described above as being “modern”, but there are certainly elements of both in there — the atmosphere and structure of a ’90s game; the unconventional approach to gameplay of Shattered Memories.

Ultimately, the whole thing ended up being a game that I’m very glad I played, and one which I have absolutely no hesitation recommending to anyone who enjoys a good ghost story, a good detective story or a bit of both. It’s an enjoyable tale told well, and a worthwhile investment of 10 hours or so of your life.

1608: Soul Suspect

I’ve been playing a game called Murdered: Soul Suspect today. It’s a game that immediately intrigued me back at the Eurogamer Expo last year when I attended a hands-off gameplay demo and developer talk about it.

For the uninitiated, the premise is this: You play the role of Detective Ronan O’Connor, a sharp-eyed investigator in the traditional sense, complete with perpetual smoking habit and the dress sense of someone from the 1940s. Ronan is investigating a murder. Nothing unusual for a detective, you might think, until you discover that the murder he’s investigating is his own. He’s dead, you see, and not altogether happy about the situation in which he finds himself. And, in traditional ghost story fashion, he can’t fully shuffle off this mortal coil until he unravels the mystery keeping him chained to existence.

Murdered: Soul Suspect has received rather poor reviews to date, with its Metacritic rating varying anywhere between the low 60s and the 40s depending on which platform you look at. And yet, as I’ve found in so many cases recently, these numbers do not paint an at all accurate picture of what the experience of playing the game is like.

It’s enormously enjoyable. It’s engrossing, well-written, well-acted and intriguing. Its blend of noir-style detective fiction and ghost stories is excellently handled, and the main storyline is backed up by some truly excellent supporting material, ranging from an exploration of setting Salem’s history to some entertaining, authentically “campfire-style” ghost stories that you can unlock by discovering collectibles around the various environments in which you find yourself.

Gameplay-wise, it’s rather simplistic: you wander around, you uncover clues — occasionally using your ghostly abilities to do so — and every so often you’re quizzed on what you’ve discovered in order to progress. These quizzes may involve putting a sequence of events in the right order, deciding on the right piece of information to use to get a witness to do something, or simply making deductions based on the evidence you’ve found. Some of the questions and answers throughout are a little obtuse — and some are deceptively obvious — but the game never feels like it’s punishing you for picking the wrong choice. Story is king here, and in this sort of game that’s exactly how it should be.

In many ways, the game feels like a late ’90s PC game, with its open, non-linear environments, lack of minimap and objective markers and… I don’t know, there’s just something about the general atmosphere of the whole thing that calls to mind titles like the original Deus Ex, Kingpin, Thief and any number of other titles from that similar era. It feels like a game out of its own time — and I kind of like that. (Oh, the PC version is also a tad buggy, too; I had to tweak an .ini file to get it running above 30 frames per second, and it works better with keyboard and mouse than it does with gamepad, but neither of these issues are something that has particularly hampered my enjoyment.)

There’s an interesting cast of characters to explore, and some enjoyable banter between Ronan and Joy, a young medium who becomes his “sidekick” and pair of physical hands as his investigation progresses. The story itself — which I’m yet to finish — is looking like it might end up being fairly predictable overall, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing; plenty of hardboiled and noir fiction is, in itself, predictable and formulaic, but that doesn’t make it any less enjoyable.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that Murdered: Soul Suspect has been unjustly lambasted by much of the press. I’m not entirely sure what people were expecting from it going in to it; I’m really enjoying it so far, and its simplistic gameplay certainly doesn’t detract from the fact that it tells an enjoyable, interesting and unusual story. And that’s what I want; I don’t need fast action sequences, sprawling open worlds or a story that drags itself out unnecessarily over the course of 40+ hours. With Murdered: Soul Suspect what I’ve got is a good, concise, enjoyable interactive story that doesn’t overcomplicate itself with unnecessary mechanics and irrelevant content.

It’s a game worth playing, in other words, and another nail in the coffin for the usefulness of most modern reviews, so far as I’m concerned.