Game Review | June 5, 2014 2:48 am

By Moo Lissa

Dear Murdered: Soul Suspect,

This should be a love letter. I should be your biggest fan. I am crazy about detective games, I’ve devoured every CSI and Sherlock Holmes game with glee, and I would be the first to jump on a “Make a sequel to NCIS” petition bandwagon. Actually, I literally might be the first for that. When I first saw the trailer Square had released for you, I was really excited. I watched it a bunch of times. I posted it on this site. I made my kids watch it. I made my mom watch it. A game where you use detective skills and ghost powers to solve your own murder. FANTASTIC. And I wanted you. I wanted you bad. Even when I played through Thief (*review incoming soon*) and saw what a huge disappointment it was, how unfinished it was, and realized that it shared a publisher with you, I still wanted to believe. So maybe I couldn’t believe with the same intensity I had felt prior to Thief (and I admit, I did decide to Redbox the 360 copy rather than buy the Xbox One copy) but the yearning was real, man. The yearning was real.

This is NOT a love letter, though. I didn’t get my happy ending. I suppose a game that operates on the premise of a dead detective solving his own murder doesn’t deserve a happy ending. But still… I deserved better than this.

The story maybe wasn’t the most original idea, but it was fairly unique. Solve detective Ronan O'Connor's murder from the other side of the grave. But as the story unfolded, it strained credibility. Solve the murder? He was investigating a murder without backup and the murderer killed him. That’s about as cut and dried as it comes, isn’t it? “Oh-ho-ho don’t worry, Kat,” you seemed to promise. “The story will get more interesting and complicated as it goes on.” And if you change the word complicated to convoluted, it definitely did. There’s no easy way to say this, M:SS, but you… are camp. Your blatant attacks on my emotions as I played were as choreographed as a soap opera slap. Your plot twist at the end… well, actually I admit it- you got me with that one. And while I love camp; I adore the overdone plot and unashamedly over the top ghost stories and overdramatic side-quests you presented me with, I’m not sure that was actually your intention. Besides, I love soap operas in general, but I’m decidedly not a game developer’s target audience.

Your characters varied from uninspired to downright unrootable. I know I was supposed to love the sainted Julia as much as Ronan did, but all those journal entries she left around town really made her look like a selfish spoiled idiot, not a grown woman, and not a woman deserving of the adulation she was apparently showered with by everyone she encountered in her life. Actually, by the end of the game, I was left with only one character that I could even stand. And it wasn't Ronan, by the way, even though you detailed every minutiae of his past to show how I should love him just as much as Julia. He was bad, but then he turned good. And who can't identify with a guy who loves his wife this much? I’m not a very nice person, and him telling a 14 year old girl to STFU about her missing mom because his wife had been dead for 3 years (as he is also currently dead) and then calling her a bitch was about all I could take of him. Seriously? This is the protagonist you're giving me? I'm supposed to want to help him?



The ability to jump into people’s heads and read their thoughts could have been a good idea- but everyone in Salem only gets 2 thoughts- and they all come from a bank of 10 total thoughts. The most interesting ghosts I came across, the ones that I wanted to be able to help, turned out to not be helpable. I guess Ronan hit his limit with the 3 or 4 he actually does help. So some of the story just doesn’t make a lot of sense, even after completing the game.

The setting of Salem for a story about ghosts was a good thought, but is Salem actually that small? And as fascinating as I find the Salem Witch Trials, less collectibles to find regarding them, and more side stories to solve for them would have been a better choice. I do think you deserve props, though, for not having the obligatory asylum level be an abandoned, haunted, terrifying level. Chalk that up as one cliché your gravelly-voiced, tattooed, smart ass, lone-wolf, bad-guy-turned-cop tortured by his wife’s death didn’t have to experience.

I know it’s my own fault for getting this game on 360, but did the graphics really have to be so bad? The character models are terrible, there are a total of 4 NPCs just reused over and over throughout the town, and everything really has such a distinct last gen feel. I’d say maybe it’s just because it was a 360 copy, but I’ve seen pictures from next gen and it isn’t much better. Sadface. But with these remedial graphics, could you at least tell me why it played so poorly? Pop in, stuttering, loading screens, bad texture mapping, and flickering edges were fairly common in my game, and I frequently bumped into edges that shouldn’t have been where they were. The demons in the game were pretty cool looking… Although they highlight one of the weakest parts of the game.


The gameplay in general should have been better. First and foremost, you’re a detective game, M:SS, and you should have provided more challenging puzzles for at home sleuths to complete! Instead, most of the puzzles were really just common sense solutions dragged out to make it feel more like players were doing any actual detective work. For instance, the first side quest I found was a dead girl looking for her body. I told her I’d help her and she said the people who murdered her were old. I went to the apartment of the only old people I had seen, and big floating letters told me I was in the right place. Reading the old lady’s mind said (paraphrasing) that she had killed the girl for partying too loud, her husband had driven 5 miles away to the location the body was disposed of, and *boom* mystery solved, right? But that’s one clue. There were 6 more clues, all either unhelpful or just the same information from a different source, and in the end I went back and told the ghost the information I extrapolated from the first person I talked to. Other great examples are when I was asked “what information do I have that could tell me where the witness was headed?” and one of the options was something like “witnesses destination” or something along those lines. Sometimes, yes you tripped me up, but because I was overthinking and trying to be clever, not because of any great difficulty on your part.

The controls really took away from the gameplay as well. When I possessed a cat and was trying to get to high areas, often the jump wouldn’t trigger (because there wasn’t actually a jump button- there was a run/action button, much like Thief) and the poor cat would run head first into a box.


When I tried to attack a demon (see, you knew I was going to come back to this, right?) if the angle was wrong or my timing was wrong, he’d see me and I’d have to scamper off, play a 10 minute game of “Where’s Ronan?” and eventually come back and try it again. Or die. And sadly, that was also an option. Not only were the demons the only actual action part of you- even though you had a distinct action feel- they were the only really scary part of the game- even though you had a distinctly survival horror feel- and you ended up being pretty formulaic by the end, and not far off from a regular point and click detective game. Well- except that you didn’t really let us do much real detecting. So really… honestly… I guess you were a decent movie that player controlled sequences kind of got in the way of. Quel dommage.

Besides fighting the controls, the part of you that was difficult was what should have been the most simple- just collecting items. A lot of the items glowed, and that was easy. Other items weren’t fully in the world, and had to be revealed first, and then collected. That was irritating. I could have handled 50 or 100 of those, but there are hundreds of these collectibles- back stories for each character you come across, ghost stories for each area you’re in, Salem history information… and it’s a bit overwhelming. Is this a thing now? Putting out a short game and enhancing it by hiding tiny items in every nook and cranny? Maybe it wouldn’t have been too bad if you could go back after finishing the game and get any that you missed- maybe you’ve heard of this? Level select, or even just having a checkpoint before the point of no return that the game reverts to after you complete it? But obviously you haven’t heard of this, because I’m missing one collectible for 6 or 7 different categories, which puts me 7 or 8 achievements away from completing the game, but to do it I have to go all the way back through and start all over. Knowing me, I’d just miss different collectibles the 2nd time through.

Do you know why it’s so hard to find them all? Because your damn city is a maze. I’m pretty sure buildings and walls move during the play through just to mess with people. It’s a tiny rendering of Salem, how can it be so hard? I spent 10 hours in the city and still couldn’t find my way around. And I know it isn’t me, people on other forums have complained that the map they got access to for preordering was wrong. Buildings wrong, collectibles in the wrong place… Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy. Get it together, dude!

One thing you really did right was your voice acting. They fit the game perfectly. Seriously. The sounds in general were pretty good- not exemplary. The demons screams kind of fit well with their scary appearance but annoying reality, and the sound cues to let you know when they had stopped looking for you were a nice touch. The rest of the sounds were pretty nondescript, which I think worked well because they weren’t distracting.

So all in all- not the worst way to spend 10 hours. Ten hours???? I can’t believe I waited so long for 10 hours. And besides going back and RE-collecting all the collectibles, there’s not a single reason to play again. That’s a bummer. And again, throwing in some kind of mission select or checkpoint to go back to get collectibles would have changed that a bit.

TL; DR? I’ll summarize, you jerk. I guess what you should take away from my letter to you is... You’re a disappointment. I don’t mind campy stories, short games, or collectibles per se… but I expected better from you. I expected you to blow my mind, keep me up at night, and make me really think hard about Ronan and how to solve his case. But you shied away from difficulty, shied away from the really interesting stories you could have told, and shied away from basically every genre that you seemed to want to be classified as. You seemed to not know whether you took yourself seriously or not, and because of that, I’m not really sure how to take you. I will think about this game, and I’ll probably play it again- because once decent collectible guides come out, this is going to be a really easy completion, and it’ll clock in at 7-8 hours if you know what you’re doing- for Xbox One. But most of what I’ll think about is how many opportunities you missed, and how great you could have been. The saddest part is that even after writing this, listing out all your flaws, fresh off a play through, I want so bad to give you an 8. Even a 7. But I can't. You're average. No matter what I was hoping for you to be.

Take care of yourself,
Kat

Relationship summary:
Plot- 6/10
Graphics- 5/10
Gameplay- 5/10
Audio- 8/10
Length/Replay Value- 4/10

OVERALL (not an average):

5/10- STILL A BETTER LOVE STORY THAN TWILIGHT!!!

Keywords: None