Murdered: Soul Suspect pulls the best bait-and-switch ever by showcasing a lightly-bearded, trilby-wearing bro and a self-important pun on its cover and then delivering a combat-free, narrative-driven game that feels more Gone Home than L.A. Noire. If your main beef with Gone Home was that it had all the haunted trappings of a ghost story but not enough literal ghosts, then Murdered might be your new favorite game. (Although, really, they could have just called it Murdered. That would have been fine. Please.)
Murdered begins with a montage that hits all the familiar videogame beats. Our hero Ronan O’Connor is a tattooed criminal who decides to go straight and become a cop. He has a power struggle with one of his fellow officers, the crotchety Baxter, who doesn’t believe Ronan’s got the chops to serve on the “right” side of the law. Ronan even has a beautiful love interest, Julia, who gets murdered in cold blood within minutes. This entire opening montage summarizes the plot of a more boring videogame, one we’ve seen before: criminal man turns cop and attempts to solve wife’s murder. Except instead of ending in Ronan solving his wife’s murder and avenging her death, this montage ends in Ronan’s own murder.
Instead of playing as bad-ass five o’clock shadow Ronan, I found myself stripped entirely of typical videogame superhero skills. As Ronan leaves his dead body behind, he tries to pick up his gun—but alas, his fingers slip right through it. Ronan also can’t destroy anything in-game, what with his newfound lack of corporeality. Instead of knocking over trashcans and stealing the spoils within, Ronan walks through all of these in silence, not leaving so much as a scratch behind.
Sometimes walls and objects are “consecrated ground” and thus unable to be traversed through; other areas are blocked by demons, Ronan’s sole enemy in-game. Fighting demons requires a little patience and a quickly timed button-press, but overall, these “fights” hardly qualify as combat by typical game standards. It’s very, very difficult to “lose” anything in Murdered, which makes a strange kind of sense, given that you’re already dead. You have no worldly possessions. The only thing you collect are clues, memories and psychically collected trappings of the people and ghosts that Ronan encounters in his journey.
Ronan got murdered by a serial killer, and now he must find that murderer’s identity before he can move on to his future afterlife with Julia. Although at first it seems that Julia is the one in the refrigerator in this game, it turns out that Ronan is the one who’s trapped and almost completely at a loss when it comes to helping himself. He eventually gets some aid from the corporeal world in the form of a young medium named Joy, a sarcastic teenage girl who can see dead people but doesn’t care for how Ronan keeps asking her to do his grunt work for him.
The game unfolds with Ronan going to various crime scenes and collecting clues either by inspecting the area or by listening in on cops and bystanders’ conversations. He can listen to people’s thoughts as well, and inhabit cats and crows and—rarely—humans for occasional small movements (Ronan’s ghost powers are definitely less invasive and less powerful than those of fellow videogame ghost Aiden in Beyond: Two Souls, for example). Once Ronan collects a few clues, he can try to start piecing them together. The user interface for doing so shows a picture of each clue; select the “most important” clues for each crime—often, whichever two or three clues seem like they fit together to tell a more complete story—which will allow Ronan to draw more conclusions. Each mystery only ever has one right answer, which makes sense, but there’s also only ever one path towards solving each mystery. It’s not a perfect system—sometimes the “right” answer just isn’t intuitive—but it feels a lot closer to crime-solving and detective work than, say, L.A. Noire or BioShock: Infinite’s “Burial At Sea” DLC. The game truly depends and revolves around clue collection and eavesdropping rather than simply shoe-horning a few of those elements in to a combat-heavy first-person shooter.