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Preview: Murdered Soul Suspect

I sat in a dark and spooky room at E3 with Doug Van Horne, a writer on Murdered: Soul Suspect, as he took me through an impressive hands-off demonstration of the game.

At an E3 where shooters were forced to share the limelight with, well… MMO-type shooters, basically, it’s great to have seen new IP that’s trying to it change up a bit. Murdered: Soul Suspect does this by throwing some old school film noir detective stuff in with the macabre, and then wraps it all up in a new take on the point and click adventure games of old.

Starting with the trailer released just a tad before E3, Van Horne set up the premise of the game. Playing as detective Ronan O’Connor, the game begins as body flies out a window and lands stories below onto the pavement. As Ronan, you see a dark figure huddle over the body, and try to stop him (or her) before the assailant can fire off point-blank shots at the prone figure. Your attempts to stop the attacker are useless as your body simply passes through his (or hers), and the gunshots produce creepy bullet holes in your own body. Eep.

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You find out pretty quickly that it’s your own body lying on the pavement, and you’ve just watched your own death. It’s gripping stuff.

Van Horne describes the game as a “supernatural detective thriller,” and it doesn’t look like Murdered is afraid to borrow from the combination of genres it’s aiming for. Ronan comes to terms with his new position in (after)life as the police arrive to investigate the new crime scene. It’s there that you find out the story is set in Salem, home of the famous witch burnings, and Ronan grimaces as an overweight beat cop basically ruins the crime scene. Typical oaf, eh? Queue comedic banter that can only come about when the dead guy that’s being discussed is right over the speaker’s shoulder as a ghost, and the tone of the game is set very quickly.

This is where the point-and-click adventure aspects of the game first come in; as Ronan releases the people investigating his murder are a bit inept, he decides it’s up to him. Well, that and he learns that he’s trapped in “Dusk” – think limbo – and needs to track down his killer to release himself fully from the mortal coil. Now, Ronan can’t really touch anything – he’s incorporeal, after all – so he needs to investigate the scene using unconventional means.

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He’s got his eyesight, so he can move behind people and read their notepads. If that’s not working, he can possess people and use their own eyes to look at notes or handle evidence. Ronan can even influence witnesses to remember what they’ve just seen. As you move around a crime scene, uncovering clues, you’ll gain XP to level up your abilities. After you’ve fully investigated an area, Murdered will ask you to make a deduction to continue on with the game’s story. You’ll basically have to pick three terms from a floating menagerie of options to show you get what’s going on.

I watched as Ronan decided he needed to go into the building that he fell from, and needed to wait for someone to actually open the door of the apartment complex to do so. You see, Salem wasn’t just picked for its spooky past; it’s because of the witch burnings that wards were placed throughout the town. Ghosts could normally enter any building they’d like, but not so in Salem. It’s a neat little way to explain why Ronan isn’t all powerful, and gives a Zelda-like “we’ll let you get to this point in the map when we’re ready” function without being overly cheap.

Inside a building, though, Ronan has nothing holding him back. He’s able to move from room to room without any problems… unless you count horrific demons that are trying to eat what’s left of his soul.

Creepy.

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Ronan can use his new-found abilities to his advantage; the demons are terrifying and powerful, but they’re not too smart. Ronan was able to double-back through a series of walls and materialise behind the demon, backstabbing him and taking him out of Dusk. It’s a nifty new take on stealth and combat that I’m excited to try out for myself.

Even though Ronan needs to catch his own murderer before he is forever stuck in Dusk and becomes a demon himself, the game will be littered with side-quests. I watched as Ronan met the ghost of a dead woman and helped her figure out where she’d been killed. Sadly, the quest’s resolution was a bit contrived; Ronan went into a different apartment and influenced the occupant to reflect on the events of days past. That in itself was okay, but when Ronan’s subject said, “the drive to the quarry was the longest five mile drive of my life,” it made me roll me eyes. How helpful of this would-be killer to super-telegraph where they’d dumped a poor woman’s body, eh?

Some of Murdered: Soul Suspect is a tad rough around the edges, but that’s not causing me and great deal of concern. I saw the beginning of a great little game, unique and tense and ultimately, enjoyable. I can’t wait to see more upon its release on current-gen consoles and PC in early 2014.


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About the author

Steve Wright

Steve's the owner of this very site and an active games journalist nearing twenty (TWENTY!?!) years. He's a Canadian-Australian gay gaming geek, ice hockey player and fan. Husband to Matt and cat dad to Wally and Quinn.