#5: Murdered: Soul Suspect

As always, potential spoilers going forward

---------- Murdered: Soul Suspect ----------

So, I missed this game when it first came out, completely flew under my radar, and that isn't saying to much. I don't remember it being highly marketed, but that could just come down to me not knowing jack about anything at any given time. Oh well, what do I know anyways? Apparently nothing. Moving on.

This is a fairly new game, coming out in 2014 for various platforms (Steam, PS3, PS4, etc.), and is a "detective game", and I'll cover quotations in a bit. Lastly, it was made by Airtight Games and published by Squeenix (Square-Enix). The game can be broken into two parts, that being the detective aspect and the collector's aspect, both being covered in detail. There is very minimal combat (if you can even call it combat), so that isn't considered.

In Murdered: Soul Suspect, you play as Ronan, a detective working in Salem, currently investigating the Bell Killer, a serial killer who has been terrorizing the area for some time. After the first confrontation within minutes of the start of the came, the Bell Killer bumps Ronan off, shooting him and sending him through a third floor window. Ronan plummets to his death, and this is where the game more or less starts, with Ronan experimenting with what he can do as a ghost. There are various powers at the players disposal You can enter others and Eavesdrop on their conversations, read their mind, look through their eyes, or even influence them by using potential memories to gain further information from them. A young ghost girl named Abigail also appears, teaching Ronan the basics of where you can go and where you can't go. The basic idea behind this is that you can pass through everything unless it is a closed off building (that meaning there has to be an open entrance in order to get inside) and spectral remnants of old Salem, which are fairly easy to spot as they are highlighted in blue. She also shows you how to remove and recreate things, such as old doors to take down or stairs that you can create. Other powers that you have but aren't enabled until certain parts in the game are possession, the ability to poltergeist electronics, and teleportation across short distances. Eventually, Ronan finds a girl, Joy (whom the Bell Killer seemed to be after), who can see and hear him, and he goes about helping her on her quest to find her mother as it may very well help my solve his murder, which will guarantee his access into the afterlife, where he can be with his long since past love, Julia. Along the way, you'll have to solve cases to piece together information and you'll have to deal with demons that look for Ronan, and these are really the only things that can kill you. They come in two forms: Spots on the floor you cannot walk over, or else hands will reach up, grab you and drain your life-force (death-force? I'm not sure), and the more physical embodiment of demons, which will patrol an area, causing you to run around, hiding in designated spots or people, in order to sneak up behind them and take them out. Both of these forms utilize a quicktime event, so I am not a big fan and near the end, this led to MUCH frustration.

So, the main draw to the game is the detective aspect (and I guess the story, which did entertain me but I was never really enthralled in it), and it goes a little something like this. You will come to crime scenes where you need to find out some information to push the plot forward, or just a point where Ronan feels stuck and needs to search for clues in order to aid in his journey. You go around the room, finding various clues at the scene in order to compile a portfolio of sorts in order to piece together what he needs to know. This is where my major problem with the game lies, and this is the main draw of the game, so its a fairly large problem. The fact that, say, you are in a crime scene and you find all the clues in the area and are the told to find the three clues that can fit together to give you information of where to go or what to do, only to have the clues sometimes directly tell you in their name that they are the information. Not even that they have or can let you figure out the info, that they ARE the info. Say Ronan searches for clues to find out where the Bell Killer went, and goes into the mind of a woman who was at the scene and attempts to influence her given the clues he has. Chances are, what will make her think of the Bell Killer is the clue that states "The Bell Killer was Here"!! I don't know, maybe its minor and stupid, as somethings are going to be obvious, especially as you're piecing them together, but it seemed pretty big to me, and caused me to groan quite a lot as I was playing the game. And that's pretty much all there is to the gameplay, there isn't anything else outside of the millions of items to collect oh...

I have very little problem with the collection aspect of the game. Very little. I am a HUGE Banjo-Kazooie fan, so I have no room to talk when deciding if there's to much stuff to gather, and this was actually the most fun I had with the game. There are four side missions in the town of Salem that you can help out with, remnants of memories and fliers that will give you info on major characters, papers that unlock Julia's thoughts, facts about the history of Salem, etc, etc. And in each location, including Salem (which can be considered the hubworld of the game), there are certain items to collect that give briefs stories that happened to people throughout the course of the town's history, usually centering around bodies being found. The only downside to this, I'd say, are the drawings. Screw the drawings. They are doodles done by presumably Abigail that adorn various walls within Salem and the buildings you visit there. But they are near impossible to find by any means and by the end I was running through buildings wall-licking just hoping and praying that the R2 button would flash on the screen so that I could collect it and get it out of the way. The reason they are so impossible is that you can barely see them, and sometimes literally cannot see them at all until you reveal them, but you have to be looking directly at where it is in order to get the button prompt to reveal them, and it gets so anger inducing by the end you just wanna scream and/or look up where everything is located!! Maybe just all games make me angry and I should really just calm down.

If you do all the things mentioned above, you should 100% the game and get all the trophies. I don't think there are any trophies that don't pertain to going through the motions of the story and collecting items.

This game isn't bad, I don't think. In my eyes, it has some really major flaws, but it isn't bad, and didn't really break either, though sometimes the visuals led me to believe it was gonna glitch or crash or both or somethin'. I wouldn't play it again, but I at least like the concept. Maybe I would like it more if you could actually possess the people too, by which I mean controlling them to physically do things. The game would have to be retooled hardcore if that was the case, though, because then it would just be a detective game, as you could leave and enter buildings whenever and wouldn't have to worry about demons. One of those rare cases where making a cool addition would just make it lamer.