Title: Murdered: Soul Suspect
Developer: Airtight Game
Publisher: Square Enix
Platform(s): PS3 (reviewed), PS4, Windows, Xbox 360, Xbox One
Genre: Action-adventure, Stealth
First things first, I had a great run running back and forth in Dark Souls, I finally got to kill the Great Grey Wolf Sif and contested Dragonslayer Ornstien and Executioner Smough in the most brutal fashion imaginable. Losing pace with the sands of time, I did manage to pen down a backlog of some interesting and boring games that requested my review. Murdered: Soul Suspect, a brainchild of the now deceased Airtight Games, is an out and out indie concept that wanted to look, sound and feel like a Triple A title. It was time to finally get over this title and pen down an honest score. With Square Enix’s divine blessings that revived some of the lost IPs of our age: Tomb Raider, Thief, Hitman, Murdered aimed big, really big enough to clash with the 2014 E3.
The Story, Plot and Concept
Murdered: Soul Suspect is an out-of-the-body experience, challenging the likes of Beyond: Two Souls in the Spiritual Domain. The concept of vengeance after death, which is the ingredient to a great horror game, takes a heroic form in Murdered: Soul Suspect, as you glide and slither through the walls of Salem, unseen. As the hero of the story, Detective Ronan O’Connor you must hunt down your killer, also known as the Bell Killer, until you reunite with your dead wife in the underworld. Ronan is shown as a stubborn and dark hero, sans pretensions and sans clever lines. When he comes back on earth as his dead self, he is aided by Joy, the witness to Ronan’s death scene and a girl who can connect to the paranormal world.
The New IP
From reviving from the state of limbo to finding out who the Bell Killer was, Murdered: Soul Suspect is a game that maybe had all the charms to becoming the next big question mark in the Indie market. But thanks to capitalism, it wanted to stay mainstream and please the Triple A’ers and became the exclamation mark in the process. Minimal action points make Murdered: Soul Suspect a promise worth remembering, but the finished product lacked everything that could have sold this massive afterlife concept to today’s restless generation. Murdered: Soul Suspect starts with a bang, but the lack of variety, in the gameplay as well as in the ghost town of Salem, makes up for the boredom that quickly succeeds it. When you expect Triple A games to puzzle you, or complicate things, Murdered: Soul Suspect only makes it simpler. There is no gradual character progression, expect some ghost abilities to be granted to you just randomly. There is no way you can just view the progress you’ve made in your own murder report, and there are tons of useless content somehow just lying everywhere in Salem. And there are demons which make you shed tears of laughter by their sheer body movement, as if they’re replicating a 70’s rocker frontman’s catwalk.
Gameplay, Physics, Level Designing and Innovation
In terms of challenges, Murdered: Soul Suspect is actually your walk in the park. The challenges go a notch higher when you are guiding your NPC character out of a cop crammed building or you’re escaping a bunch of the demons. The game is deliberately poised to give you a violence-free, explorative afterlife. Taking possession of NPCs and cats is the best way a ghost can exercise his superiority. But even when you’re taking possession, the lack of variety in the NPC dialogue box and lesser animated expressions leaves the experience duller than you’d expect. Repeated dialogues and ‘You don’t say’ moments have made me hate the game at times.
The sandbox of Salem’s quasi open map is a commendable piece of work. The buildings and backyards look amazing, even on the old gen Playstation 3. The lack of action points and AI character detailing makes the achievement crumble earlier than usual. There are a lot of open loops in the game that needs to be fixed, like the side quests and its primary connection to the central story, as some of them don’t even have any connection to the Bell Tower legacy. While some of them are just plain sad pieces of content.
The gameplay can be bisected quite joyously into two halves – Exploring and Stealth. It is linearly conceptualised and executed. While exploring deals with the majority of this afterlife detective game, unlocking clues, triggering memories and solving the missing clues needed to move on to the next chapter, stealth comes into play when you are bypassing a demon infested level. Escaping demons can be painfully tough or you can simply glide from one ghost remnants (fog like items that conceal your presence from the demons) or possess an animal/human being nearby. Ronan’s vision mode shows the ghost remnants and demons in bluish white and orange orbs respectively even before you venture into the territory. Later in the game, Ronan unlocks the ability to teleport from one place to another. You can step into a demonic mud pool and get sucked into it, the only way to escape it is, you got it right, Quick Time Event. There is no health bar and ammo count, there are no guns, except for a ghostly cigarette that never expires, so keep your hard-core strategies aside.
The innovations lie deeply hidden and under shadowed by the weaknesses of Murdered. The ghastly apparitions that lead you towards your objective is one of the most innovative pieces of work that I’ve seen of late. The time when you suddenly walk through a human body and your controller vibrates a little, is one of those key takings from Murdered’s ambitions. There are buildings you can ghostly pass through, and there are some you can’t. Every time you go through a wall, you leave a mark of your ghastly body on it, thereby making sure that you don’t lose your way while having fun playing a ghost.
Visuals and Sound:
There are magical moments from the sound department in parts of Murdered: Soul Suspect, rest of the times they are as confused as the script writers themselves. The music that greets you at the gates of the mental asylum will surely take you off guard, somehow reminding me of the Moira Asylum from Thief (2014).
Visually, Murdered: Soul Suspect is there for sure. It captures the sulky, night-time atmosphere of the serial killer infested town of Salem and is so deeply detailed that it makes you believe that indeed you’re an apparition. The smoky trails, the cryptic messages on the wall and the volumetric lighting, they all stand out. Except for the character animations and the cutscenes. They just replaced the need for detailed character movements with an overdose of blue/black filter.
Conclusion
After I finished Out There, an excellent indie game out on smart devices, I was blown over by the amount of research the game developers did in terms of presenting a unique storyline and a cultivated backstory. The backstory and the American Horror Story essence is profound in Murdered: Soul Suspect and could’ve easily been one of the greatest Indie Games of this year, had they just focused on making us believing the story, and keeping the controls as simple as possible. But in my opinion they went the wrong way to please the wrong audience and did a scratchy Triple A work, and might go down as one of the titles I would never recommend anyone to play. I was excited for Murdered: Soul Suspect because of my distinct fascination with out-of-body-experience as incorporated in one of my few favourites, like Gasper Noe’s film Enter the Void. But Murdered: Soul Suspect just killed the feeling.
Now if you’d excuse me, I’ve got a boss to kill in Dark Souls.
