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Murdered: Soul Suspect Review for Xbox 360

Murdered: Soul Suspect Review for Xbox 360

The Mystery Is Puzzling

Murdered: Soul Suspect is a game with a lot of ideas. It defies genre, being sort of a stealth, sort of a visual novel, sort of an action game that never quite fits into any category. It has a dark and interesting plot which tasks you with finding the identity of your own murderer. It gives you a bunch of ghostly powers to work on solving a murder no living mortal could. It puts you in a huge open world with the power to walk through walls and teleport. Honestly, this game has everything you could want in a paranormal murder mystery… and none of it actually works.

You see, Murdered is one of those games that works better on paper than it does in practice, and you notice this every single minute you are playing the game. You play Ronan, a tough crook turned detective that is looking for the man who just killed him…. and apparently trying to get back together with his dead wife or something. The main gameplay surrounds investigation. You are tasked with finding clues, piecing them together and following leads to your killer. We have all played games like Phoenix Wright and 999 before, so we all know how compelling Murder Mysteries can be, but the problem is that there is no real mystery here.

Sure, you don’t know the identity of your killer, but you are also powerless to find out until the game ferries you there. The clues you find aren’t really clues. They don’t slowly reveal story elements, allowing you to piece together your killer’s identity outside the game. Rather, they tend to be tangentially related to the case at best. Your progress is usually blocked until you find one right clue, but since you have little input on which clue is the “right” one, this feels a lot more like a fetch quest than it does a mystery.

Of course, you have your ghost powers to help you out, but these really aren’t all that spectacular either. Most of them are just ghostly versions of otherwise mundane activities. For example, the first thing you learn to do is walk through walls. Cool right? Unfortunately, all the buildings in Salem are “consecrated” so you can only enter and leave them through open doors and windows. Lame. There are also “ghost walls” that exist overlapping the normal mundane walls, which you also can’t pass through. Double lame. Really, all that passing through walls lets you do is have a very limited amount of no clip in a very limited amount of area.

Murdered: Soul Suspect Screenshot

That being said, you usually end up passing through doors anyway! You see every time you pass through a wall you leave a ghost mark, to try and help you keep track of where you have been. If you leave it on the wall, you basically have no clue what is on the other side. However, if you leave it on the door you can easily keep track of what rooms you have visited and what ones you haven’t. So there’s basically no reason to use your phasing powers ever.

You have a whole bunch of other useless powers as well. You can possess people, but that doesn’t mean you can control them. You can “eavesdrop” to hear what they are saying or “mind read” to hear what they are thinking, but basically this is just a glorified “talk” button and they rarely have anything useful to say. You can “peep” which lets you see through the eyes of the person you are possessing, but once again this is really nothing more than a glorified “look” button. You can “influence” people to say or do what you want, but all this tends to be is selecting the right clue off a menu in order to make the story go forward. The most useful powers are teleport, which lets you leap short distances, and animal possession, which lets you get around places your ghost body cant, but even then the areas in which you can use these powers are limited and you can only use them in a very specific way to make the game move forward.

Murdered: Soul Suspect Screenshot

While you are investigating, demons will try to hunt you down and eat you… because reasons. The addition of an enemy does make the game a bit more tense, but it’s absolutely not needed in a mystery game! If these demons catch you they will suck your soul, which leads to a game over. So you have to hide from them as you conduct your investigation, which causes a needless amount of finicky rerouting. The only way to beat these demons is to sneak up behind them, hold a button, and succeed at a quick time event. There’s no combat, no spirit bullets, no ghostly fighting powers. Just sneaking around and trying not to die.

Unfortunately, it’s very hard not to die… again. Demons are everywhere and while you can see them through walls with another ghost ability, it’s nearly impossible to keep track of them all. You will frequently round a corner only to run into one and die. You can “hide” in the leftover ectoplasmic wisps of other souls until the demon loses interest, but this basically defangs the enemies all together. You can literally just poof vanish right in front of their eyes and then they shrug and go about their business. Sometimes you can hop from hiding spot to hiding spot to avoid being seen, but since this has nothing to do with walls or cover, it doesn’t feel like a stealth game. It feels like you are taking the long way around to a clue because the developers told you to.

What’s most frustrating is the fact that demons are the only way to die. There is no penalty for failing an investigation. If you put two clues together wrong you lose a “badge” but this is just an arbitrary rating. A game whose entire premise is “solve this mystery” doesn’t punish you for screwing up when solving the mystery!

Murdered: Soul Suspect Screenshot

Finally, there are the side quests. While you look for your murderer, you will find other ghosts you are looking for their murderers. Unfortunately, it’s hard to look at these side quests as compelling. You are quite literally on a mission to save yourself from a hellish afterlife and reunite with your long lost dead wife. You don’t have time to search for six water boilers or whatever will but random Joe Ghostypants to rest. You also don’t really get anything for doing these side quests, so you might as well just pass them up.

I really wanted to like Murdered: Soul Suspect more than I did. The graphics are awesome. The voice actors do a fantastic job. The environments are interesting, especially when you see the ghostly versions of old Salem overlapped over the modern day version. The story is genuinely interesting and kept me playing far after the fun had drained out of the game. But in all honesty, I cannot recommend it. With a couple tweaks, this could have been an awesome game, but as it stands Murderer: Soul Suspect is dead on arrival.

RATING OUT OF 5 RATING DESCRIPTION 4.0 Graphics
I actually like Murdered’s aesthetics, but they don’t make up for the poor gameplay. 2.5 Control
The PC version’s controls seemed to constantly spaz out. Also many times the confirm button was mislabeled as right click when I had to press enter. 4.0 Music / Sound FX / Voice Acting
The actors do a great job with a quite enjoyable script. 2.0 Play Value
The fun faded quite quickly and soon the game became a slog. 2.5 Overall Rating – Avverage
Not an average. See Rating legend below for a final score breakdown.

Review Rating Legend
0.1 – 1.9 = Avoid 2.5 – 2.9 = Average 3.5 – 3.9 = Good 4.5 – 4.9 = Must Buy
2.0 – 2.4 = Poor 3.0 – 3.4 = Fair 4.0 – 4.4 = Great 5.0 = The Best

Game Features:

  • A compelling and twisting storyline supported by a great cast of intriguing characters to make you constantly question the secrets that Salem hides, Motion capture and voice acting provides an incredibly realistic and believable experience.
  • Move freely from one haunting location to the next in this brooding city with deep-rooted ties to the supernatural and mysterious, Even if you have completed your investigation, return to previous scenes to follow new leads.
  • Survive powerful demonic spirits that devour souls in the belief that they can regain their own as you strategically use supernatural abilities to evade and outwit them before they can tear away your soul forever.
  • Investigate by using supernatural skills, possess people to read their minds, Follow leads by walking-through walls, teleporting and discover new information by revealing memories or interrogating the dead, Use poltergeist skills to create distractions.
  • Seek-out hundreds of collectibles, side-quests and cases from Salem’s citizens past to learn facts about the town and its people, improve your detective ranking and help you piece together the truth about the killer.

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