A video game death is usually a sign of failure, to be swiftly followed by a checkpoint reload, respawn countdown or a profanity-laden rage quit. However, death in Murdered: Soul Suspect marks the very start of your journey, rather than an inconvenient detour from it. As the ghost of murdered cop Ronan O’Connor, your primary goal is to deduce the identity of your killer – who remains at large amongst the residents of Salem – so that you might pass on to the afterlife and so claim your just deserts.
Murdered: Soul Suspect’s stylish title sequence serves to chronicle Ronan’s troubled past and depict its key events through the ink with which this renegade cop has adorned his body. Unfortunately, what follows is a clunky tutorial that is at pains to confirm that, yes, you really are quite dead, before going on to highlight the standard manner in which to progress video game dialogue and how to use the analogue sticks.
Once control is passed to you proper you’re set loose on the town of Salem to begin investigating your murder and to help out the sorry souls who remain trapped betwixt this plane and the next due to unresolved business. In doing so, you’ll uncover Ronan’s past, as well as the stories of the spooky town and its unfortunate residents, past and present.
The key things for us are to tell a really great story supported by an interesting investigation mechanic.
“The key things for us are to tell a really great story supported by an interesting investigation mechanic,” explains Eric Studer, senior design producer at Airtight Games. “Also, we’re fulfilling that desire of living out your life as a ghost, so getting to places that you wouldn’t normally be able to go to and seeing things that you may not normally have the chance to see.”
At this point, you’d be forgiven for assuming that death would bring with it a certain degree of freedom and that you might have plenty of cool tricks up your sleeve. However, this is only partially true. Death here appears to bring with it as many constraints as it does ghostly super-powers as, early on, Murdered: Soul Suspect limits your freedom in an attempt to focus your attention on a particular scenario in a specific location.
What this amounts to, in the opening 90-minutes at least, is a frustrating lack of forward momentum and excitement as you’re funnelled through a series of rooms to start to piece together how you came to be dead and what you can possibly hope to do to help apprehend your killer. It’s here that the investigation mechanics begin to reveal themselves through a series of basic scenes in which you search an area for clues. Then, choosing either individual clues or selecting two or three together to form a single coherent concept, you can help Ronan arrive at the same conclusion that you yourself did ten minutes prior and so progress the story.
There’s also the ability to possess the living in order to hear the one or two thoughts they have running around their heads in the hope that they might be relevant to your predicament. With certain individuals, it’s possible to manipulate their behaviour by having them focus on a particular detail that you’ve uncovered and so prompt them to say or do something of note. Currently, collecting this info, both in terms of the main story and side-missions feels like a laborious and largely joyless process; like you’re not so much sleuthing as simply eavesdropping on the correct person.
We didn’t want to overly punish the player for not doing super well in an investigation.
Furthermore, it appears that there’s little danger of botching your investigation, drawing the wrong conclusions or deviating from the one true path to uncovering your killer’s identity. A performance rating system based simply on how well you’ve done – for example, how many attempts it took you to select the correct clue – is used in place of any meaningful success or failure metric and there seems little potential for your incompetent guess work to cause anything untoward to happen along the way.
There’s hope that this might change later in the story as Studer confirms that there’ll be opportunities to revisit areas once you’ve unlocked additional ghostly powers. However, with the progression system tied strictly to narrative progression – rather than, say, your performance – and limited ways to progress the story, there’s little indication that you’ll run any real risk of going off-piste and it seems that this is just how Airtight intends it.
“We didn’t want to overly punish the player for not doing super well in an investigation because we didn’t want them to get too frustrated, put the controller down and walk away from the game,” says Studer. “Instead, we wanted the player to be able to track their progress through the game and if they haven’t done super well then the next time they play the game we wanted them to be able to have an indicator of whether they’re doing better next time.”
Of course, this segment of play is taken from the very beginning of the game, where things are likely to be most tightly controlled and freedom particularly constrained while you’re taught what being dead means in game play terms. Potentially, things may open-up exponentially after the early chapters but if Airtight Games hopes for the majority of Murdered: Soul Suspect’s players to reach this unconfirmed nirvana it might consider loosening the reins a little more quickly. So far, I’m less flummoxed by who killed Ronan than I am by the discovery that death isn’t as much fun as I’d hoped.
Stace Harman is a freelance contributor to IGN and is convinced that zombies will one day inherent the Earth. You can follow him on Twitter.
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