Murdered: Soul Suspect Review

The action adventure video game Murdered: Soul Suspect was developed by Airtight Games and published by Square Enix. The plot revolves around the geographical area of Salem, Massachusetts, where Detective Ronan O’Connor is murdered by being thrown out of a window. Prior to being thrown out of the window, the player controlled protagonist is in the midst of pursuing a tenacious serial-killer, called the Bell Killer, who ends up killing off Ronan by shooting him.

Resurrected as a ghost, the protagonist is finally able to re-unite with his long dead wife, who informs him that that the only way they can be whole again is if Ronan completes a series of objectives in the real world to break the binding that is preventing him from escaping the real world. In order to do this, Ronan has to investigate his murder, and does so by gaining instruction how to use his new ghostly abilities.

Gameplay

Since the entire game revolves around the protagonist loitering around the desolate city as a free roaming undead spirit, bypassing solid walls and non-scalable obstacles; which would have been impossible for Ronan’s human form to cross, being a ghost does have its perks. Although examination of various locations and locales continuously ends up becomes a tedious operation, discovering clues that will lead to the epilogue of the entire plot is worth playing for. As the player progresses forward, you will come across different non-playable characters (NPCs) in the form of ghosts who are restrained in the real world due to unfinished business, so meeting individuals belonging to your own kin will make the player feel right at home. The player can choose to collect and assemble clues related to the deaths of individuals who are still trapped in Salem, so each new loophole leads to a whole different story.

Graphics

Since the publishing was supervised by none other Square Enix, you could expect a number of ‘eye candy’ graphical features to be viewed; especially if you happen to be a PC gamer. Since console gamers do not possess the level of autonomy to alter graphical settings like PC gamers do, constructing the game using the Unreal Engine 3 automatically means that the title was going to be visual bliss. It might not possess the same form of embellishment as titles created on the CryEngine 3 (such as Crysis 2 and Crysis 3), mid ranged gaming systems would easily be able to handle satisfactory frames while enabling all of the available graphical settings.

Square Enix is notorious for the publishing of graphically impressive games, which out of the many games, Tomb Raider, Sleeping Dogs and Hitman Absolution are notable titles. There were some elements of Murdered: Soul Suspect that transformed a satisfactory title in to a mundane one. The one thing developers should look out for is toning down the superfluous factor in gaming titles. After all, if titles like GTA can get so boring that players actually start following traffic rules to the letter, then even such titles deserve to start exuding boredom.