Murdered: Soul Suspect Review

Ronan O’Conner has just been murdered. His body now lies bleeding in the street surrounded by investigating police officers. He’s been thrown out of a window and shot numerous times in the chest. Yet, in the time between these two instances – that of being thrown from the window and the gun shots rupturing his ribs – Ronan has a chance to reanimate his body. I say reanimate because at this point Ronan is a ghost standing over his himself, helplessly muttering in disbelief.  At that very moment, as Ronan struggles to come to terms with his current situation, his killer approaches, gun in hand, moving purposefully forward to finish off his victim. Ronan jumps back into his own body hoping to  - and suddenly the player is in control – they are tasked with lining up Ronan’s ghost limbs with those of his physical body in a desperate attempt to bring him back to the physical world and take some action to stop his killer – but. But there isn’t enough time.

Murdered: Soul Suspect opens, in my opinion, with an exciting proposition. Firstly it’s a thrilling start to a story (a man struggles and ultimately fails to prevent his own death), but also, from a gameplay perspective, it signals the players departure from the physical world of the living; meaning that for the rest of the game the player will be a ghost, able to walk through walls and remain unseen by the majority of the game world’s population. Unfortunately, in neither of these two areas does the game really deliver on its initial ideas, especially in terms of gameplay. 

Thankfully its story and setting do provide some interesting ideas – even if they also regularly fall into detective story clichés. It’s a frustrating game which in so many ways feels unfinished. But I did gain quite a bit of enjoyment from it not least in that it tries (at times) to give the player something distinctive. Unfortunately, most of its originality is over shadowed by the game’s contradictory reliance on extremely boring tropes – most barefaced of which is the “collect-a-thon” nature of its core gameplay and narrative exposition. And yet, even this aspect of the game – which is outwardly dull - I found of interest and, to begin with, quite compelling.

However, I think it’s worth mentioning the setting to begin with. Why am I struggling to think of another game set in the town of Salem? Of all places, Salem seems to me like the ripest setting for a schlocky horror/detective videogame. But Murdered doesn’t merely use its location as a quick and easy way to set up a witch based murder mystery. The setting and the central narrative device – that of our protagonist being a ghost – allow for the town’s notorious past to take up residence in the present day. Ronan, now being among the dead, can see ghosts of both humans and the buildings of the old town. As such, when wandering around Murdered’s hub-world we run into reminders of the past at every turn; from ghosts regretting their last moments among the living to spectral buildings forever burning in the flames which finally consumed them. This produces a remarkable sense that Salem is a town perpetually haunted by its past. At once a modern town filled with cafes, Museums, and Police Headquarters and, at the same moment, shadowed by murder, regret, and 17^th century paranoia.

Reminiscent of the way in which horror stories tend to literalise psychological fears (most notably in this instance the influential Silent Hill series of videogames), Murdered’s Salem literalises the presence of the past in modern day America – hidden from sight but still visible to those able to look deeply enough (and, in this case, by being a ghost). The ghostly presence of Salem’s past in the hub-world contrasts with the more standard mode of exposition carried out by the numerous historical plaques situated throughout the town. They are collected, like everything else in the game, by identifying their shiny glow (a burgeoning videogame trope of its own) and pressing X. They outline specific instances of Salem’s witch trial history and, along with a level which takes place in the town’s Museum, they depict Salem as a place very much in touch with its notorious past. In fact, when playing through the level in the Museum the player is able to appreciate how modern people engage with the exhibition – visitors displaying shock, disgust, and an overall empathy with the victims of the trials.

So, the past here isn’t as repressed as we might expect from a horror game. Rather the town seems to be doing its best to come to terms with its history. Elsewhere the game develops this theme of coming to terms with the past by introducing side missions in which Ronan helps out ghost like himself; stranded in the purgatory of haunting the living. Ronan and the player are tasked with finding evidence (again collecting shiny things) which can give some closure to the confused ghosts. There is a strong sense that one must come to terms with the past before one can move on with life (or death).

In contrast to these side investigations are the rather more disturbing instances in which Ronan talks to ghosts unable or unwilling to progress to the ‘other side’. These are typically delinquent characters who have pursued some reprehensible thoughts or ideas throughout their lives and are either happy in their ghost form or, perhaps, fear the retribution which might meet them ‘hereafter’. In any case, they represent the opposing side to the game’s general message of reconciliation and resolution. This opposing principle is magnified in our main villain, whose refusal to reconcile with the events of the past leads them to commit terrible harm to those in the present. It’s a reasonably positive message to take away from the game and speaks also to the way it presents history. If we refuse to reconcile with our past (as a person or as a country) we end up in a kind of purgatory, unable to move forward – or worse: doing harm.

The theme of resolution can also be related to the overarching obsession this game has with collecting shiny things. While this game mechanic gets old very quickly (seeing as it felt old before this game was even made!), I did manage to enjoy the way it matched up with the ‘police investigation’ narrative. The whole game is a series of police investigations (broken up by a mundane stealth-thing which I found either overly easy or incredibly frustrating). In each investigation Ronan must find and look at (pick up – I guess – maybe remember) each clue. This is reminiscent of ‘point and click adventure’ puzzle games but without the lateral puzzles; or at least including a very simple form of memory game. Once you’ve collected (pointed at and clicked on) all the requisite evidence you are then able to pick the most prominent pieces of evidence to the case in hand and, in doing so, induce in Ronan some kind of psychic flashback (the more I think about the core mechanics of the game the harder it is to recommend).

In any case, this whole method of finding and processing evidence in order to understand and help people around you links to game’s general premise that the truth must be faced up to. Coming to terms with the truth of one’s past is compared to how one must build up a case through evidence in order to understand the truth of a given situation. This is literally the case in many of the side-quests which require Ronan and the player to gather evidence which will enlighten the ghost you are helping to the circumstances of their death. Once they better understand their last moments on Earth the better they are able to understand their past lives and move on to the future.

At first this appears to be a refreshingly positive (though somewhat self-helpy) message for a videogame to promote. Issues do arise however when the game asks the player to put this into practice via the game’s central “evidence puzzle” mechanic (copyright Joe Smith 2015). It may, on paper, be reminiscent of the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney series of games, which required the player to deliver notable evidence at crucial moments in a trial. But whereas that game somehow managed to make that task into something unnaturally exciting, Murdered does the opposite. The player must simply choose, out of all the evidence collected, which are the most important, select them, and there we go. That’s it. There is no excitement to this part of the game, nor is there any in game penalty for not just guessing the answer (which at times, due to the unintuitive framing of a couple of the puzzles – and my own impatience - I stooped to).

But let’s not do this admittedly poor approximation of interpreting evidence a complete disservice. I would argue that what the designers were trying to achieve here is actually quite ambitious. In a game where violence is spurned in favour of the power on the human mind to propel the events of the game, this is at least an attempt to ‘gameify’ that action. It is essentially trying to simulate the thought process of a person connecting ideas together, which is a pretty great idea. And once again it reveals the game, at heart, to be about finding and using the truth of a situation to move forward. It’s just a shame that it comes across as terribly simplified and lacking in quality as an actual game mechanic.

Curiously, in a game about the supernatural, this is really a game about finding the truth and coming to terms with that truth. Despite being about brutal murders, both present day and historical, it is positive about our capacity to overcome such things. In this respect, and in ways stated above, this game is actually rather ambitious. It is an ambition hidden under outwardly facile gameplay, but, if we look closer, I believe the evidence is there for us to find.