review
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POSTED 4/6/14


MURDERED: SOUL SUSPECT

Square Enix



You’re a dick.

Erm, that’s in the police detective sense. You’re based in Salem, Massachusetts – yep, that witchy place - and you’re tailing the nefarious ‘Bell Killer’. He kinda wins, you’re dead and usually that’d be game over.

But here, you game on in total purgatorial (and chain-smoking) form. Informed by your also-dead wife’s ghostly apparition that you can’t just stick your ghostly feet up, relax and do whatever ghostly couples do until you bring down this ring-a-ding sucker, you set off to utilise those dick skills.

Kinda a mush-up of LA Noire, Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls, with some classic graphic adventure chucked in just before the cake tin was shoved in the oven, Murdered: Soul Suspect’s main game – although fairly linear save for an open-worldish main area - is great fun if you’re into a bit of Sherlockesque Marpleism (despite the inexplicable absence of mapping.) You collect clues, you process them, you move onto the next lot – rinse, repeat. Along the way you’ll also collect collectibles, ranging from a history of Salem to unveiling further story bits related to, well, the story that’s unfolding.

It’s the sort of game that some people will love and thus forgive some clunkiness, and others will just despise.

Unfortunately though, speaking of dicks, somebody seemingly thought, “Ooh, we only have around 10 hours of gameplay here, so gamers’ll crucify us. How can we make it last longer?” Then some even bigger dick came up with utterly incongruous devil ghost thingies, requiring stealth, too much patience and a fuckload of luck considering the mechanism to escape them is broken. Whomever it was is – sadly - solely responsible for slicing at least two points off that score below.

It’s just bullshit elongation for the sake of it, and it’s about time devs (and many gamers) realise that it’s better having an engaging 10-hour game than an infuriating 18-hour one.

Dicks.

take me back to the start...

 



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ALL WRITTEN CONTENT COPYRIGHT © AMY FLOWER 2008-2018. GAME IMAGES COURTESY OF RESPECTIVE GAMES COMPANIES.