Murdered: Soul Suspect – as Lifeless as the Ghost That Stars in It
Note: I actually wrote this about three weeks ago, but through laziness it’s been sat in my draft pile for a while. I figure that October is a good month to publish an article about a game that concerns ghosts, possession and demons.
I’m sat here watching Dan Bull’s rap about Murdered: Soul Suspect and I’m actually seething, because his rap is actually better than the game was. I’ve mentioned this game at least twice on the PAYNEful podSPLOSION, and I get the feeling that if I don’t splurge out my feelings towards the game in a blog post then I’ll be letting this game sit on my subconscious for a while. Writing about something tends to purge it from my brain, so here goes.
It’s not a bad game, at all. It’s not particularly a good game either. It is one of those games that will be forgotten about within the next ten years, left to be a curiosity preserved on my shelf and in second-hand game stores for years to come. Retsupurae might do a Wrongpurae of it at some point, but it’s not as interesting as the other games they’ve covered so I severely doubt it. Previous console generations, back when the industry was more affordable for third party developers to create new games, had metric tonnes of these sorts of games. Remember Time Commando, or Pandemonium? Probably not, because they weren’t memorable enough.
The saddest part, and the part that annoys me to my core, is that Murdered could have been a lot more interesting. The concept behind it is that you are Ronan O’Connor, ex-criminal turned detective. On a routine murder investigation Ronan is launched from a high window and then shot repeatedly by the murderer. With the unsolved murder weighing on his conscious, he becomes a ghost doomed to walk the earth until his “unfinished business” is fulfilled.
It sounds like an interesting concept in principle, except you quickly realise that being a ghost is actually bloody boring. You cannot interact with anyone bar cats and those with a psychic disposition, you can’t pick things up and even the core concept of being ethereal gets its legs cut out from under it pretty early on – the town Ronan lives in is Salem, Massachusetts, a town with a notorious background of the eponymous Salem witch trials. Most of the buildings are consecrated ground, which means that Ronan can only enter very specific buildings. It’s a concept that makes sense, but it immediately saps all the fun out of being a ghost. I genuinely get the feeling that the “consecrated ground” was just an excuse for the developers not to have to develop a complete town – I think a lot of people would have preferred to have the full run of Salem, learning everyone’s daily routines and discovering their dirty little secrets. It sounds like an unreasonable request, but this is something that Deadly Premonition did fantastically well, and that game had half the budget. You could walk around Deadly Premonition’s Greenvale for days like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day and learn every inch of it. It was fun!
To compound the geographical limitations further, Ronan is subject to navigating “ghost scenery”. I really like the concept of buildings and events leaving an indelible mark on a town’s spiritual background – there’s a plague hospital on top of a hill overlooking a cemetery that is really creepy, but aside from a delusional plague doctor and a patient who don’t realise they are dead, it’s not particularly remarkable. It’s a building you have to chase a ghost through to get to the other side. The only other bit of ghost scenery worth noting is inside a museum that used to be a train station – an ethereal train still chugs through one of the corridors again and again, and provides a frustrating timing mini-game that comes out of nowhere and which remains the only example of such a challenge in the entire game1. Otherwise, a lot of the time the ghost furniture is just a nuisance, blocking off alleyways and making you navigate around hurdles just for the sake of it.
The majority of the gameplay is exploration and collecting things. I can summarise 90% of the game as “find a thing, look at it, find another thing, make a conclusion” and repeat. I realise that this is the basis of point-and-click adventure games since the year dot, but most adventure games require you to make a leap of logic at some point in order to progress. Most of the “puzzles” in Murdered involve looking at random items at the scene of the crime, then the game asks you which item is the most relevant. Unfortunately, these questions are usually along the lines of “which item would remind this person about the murderer” and the item that’s most relevant is actually called “the murderer”. I would often try and make a logical guess, only to find that I was over-thinking things and the game was actually looking for a really simple response. I realise that a big thing in gaming these days is to make them accessible to everyone, but this is just patronising – for a fan of adventure games like the excellent Sherlock Holmes series or L.A. Noire, this games is frustratingly easy.
To offer a different challenge and provide a bit of variety, Ronan sometimes encounters demons. These are grim reaper-like spectres that attempt to devour Ronan when they see him. They patrol back-and-forth along specific paths, and the idea is that you need to get Ronan up behind them and “exorcise” them. They aren’t particularly scary, you can run straight up behind them without them hearing you and Ronan has the ability to see them through walls, which diminishes their threat level. Add to this the fact that every area is populated with “hiding spots” – areas in mid air that are labelled as such – and even getting caught is only a minor inconvenience of teleporting from hiding spot to hiding spot until the demons get bored and return to their patrol route. If the puzzle sections are patronisingly easy for adventure game fans, the sneaking sections are as equally boring for fans of sneaking games like Metal Gear Solid. Demon encounters quickly became a boring nuisance, simply prolonging the game before I could move on to the next story segment. Even clumping the demons together to make it more awkward to exorcise them only provided a small amount of extra challenge and a large amount of annoyance.
There are also segments where you get to possess a cat and follow a ghostly trail to climb up walls and through windows. These sections are quite novel but are suffocated by linearity and a game engine that’s too rigid to allow the jumping and climbing to be any real fun. They are a minor distraction at best.
If you concentrate on the core game, Murdered is about five hours long (if that). The rest of the game is made of (sigh) scavenger hunts. There are around seven separate lists of collectibles that are hidden throughout the game, and they are mostly short paragraphs of text designed to fill out the background of the town of Salem and Ronan’s back-story. I am usually pretty patient with text documents in games, as I like flavour text and world-building, but when a lot of the world is based around chunks of text I tend to skim over a lot of the details. The rule “show, don’t tell” means a lot, especially in an interactive medium like gaming.
I often complain about video games at length, and it’s very easy to knock something down. How would I improve this game? Try this – the game is exactly the same concept, except rather than being a ghost you are a psychic detective who doesn’t get killed at the beginning. You have full roam of the town, and a lot of the locals know who you are – there is a playful element of being a “lad about town”. Every time Ronan encounters a crime scene, he can use both his detective smarts and spiritual insight to detect things that have happened – it would be a bit like the excellent detective sections in the otherwise banal Arkham Origins. I’d scrap the demon encounters entirely, but if there was a requirement for sneaking sections Ronan could have to sneak around his fellow police officers as they have him on their list of suspects (and generally hate his phoney-baloney “psychic” credentials). The demon angle might work if you really wanted a survival horror bent to it.
The problem is, the game I’ve just described there already exists. It’s called Deadly Premonition. It’s quirky, fun and has a charming sense of humour and confidence to it that Murdered lacks. In fact, just go and play Deadly Premonition!
Note: The benefit of publishing this three weeks after writing it is that I have since played Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments, the latest Sherlock adventure from Frogwares, and frankly it embarrasses the pants off of Murdered: Soul Suspect. The first case of six in the game outshone the entirety of Murdered in terms of the quality of the puzzles and the detective gameplay. I think we can consider this game dead and buried. If you like detective or puzzle games, give the latest Sherlock game a try.
- Apparently Ronan can still be “killed” by ghost items. I’m not sure how this works, and I don’t think the developers knew either as it is never explained. ↩
Post by Sean Patrick Payne+ | October 11, 2014 at 12:04 pm | Reviews, Video Games | No comment
Tags: bitching about video games, Deadly Premonition, game review, Murdered: Soul Suspect