WYP
News Guru
Port Report: Murdered - Soul Suspect
Today we take a look at Murdered Soul Suspect, the ghost detective game developed by Airtight Games and published by Square Enix. Let’s see if this is a worthwhile purchase.
Game Settings and Performance
As always, it is very important to assess the quality of the PC version of the title. I'll start by saying that all the menus are traverse-able by mouse and the in-game controls are pretty well suited mouse and keyboard, but you can use a console controller if you wish.
Sadly when it comes to controls, keys are not rebindable but the default controls are fine. Some extra choice here would be welcome here but the PC controls are very intuitive and I didn’t feel the need to adjust them so +1.
When it comes to Graphical options there is a lot of stuff to work with. Great for users who wish to tweak their performance for whichever framerate or graphical fidelity they prefer. I played the game maxed out at 1440p on an R9 290 at stock speeds, here I experienced a framerate which on most occasions was around 80FPS with noticeable dips to 45 and sometimes reaching as high as 120FPS. This performance is very good, especially the very high levels of AA used. I doubt many Systems will not be able to play this this game at 1080p 60FPS without tinkering with anything but AA setting.
Within the 6 hours it taken to complete the Single player campaign I experienced no crashes or issues of any kind, so the quality of the PC port can’t be described as anything but stellar.
Story
In this game you play as Ronan O’Conner, a criminal turned cop who worked for the Salem Police Dept. You start entering a house and attempt to arrest the man already inside, but you fail to subdue this criminal and you wind up being thrown out a window and as you lay on the ground after the fall the criminal pick up your own gun and shoots you until you are dead. This man turns out to be the infamous “Bell Killer”, a serial killer who hunts Women and has so far evaded the police.
This is where the story truly begins, Ronan has unfinished business on Earth so his Soul cannot depart into the great beyond, he simply must find out who his killer is and stop him. Ronan from here needs to use his powers both as a Detective and as a Ghost in his investigation and finally be able to rest in peace. From here you will move throughout the city, hunting down every lead while simultaneously finding out more about your citys dark past.
When you take your time and take in the areas you walk through you are rewarded by some particularly well written scenes and dialogue, which can easily be missed by players who storm forward towards the main objective.
One good example is finding a TV ghost hunter who is unaware of the ghost standing in front of his camera, or some bystanders who when possessed by Ronan have thoughts like “I wonder of anyone can read minds”.
As a whole the story is a typical detective game story, albeit with a ghostly twist. It is linear from start to finish, without any choices or even multiple endings, but remains interesting throughout. The game is well acted and I was satisfied with the conclusion, which took about 5-6 hours to do. More time can be spent in the game finding in-game collectables and helping other lost souls find peace, but this does not add anything to replayability really. In short Murdered: Soul Suspect is a game you will only play once, as once the story is concluded there is nothing that Merits a replay.
Gameplay
The game has two real states of play, travel and investigation. While traveling you will either be exploring a particular part of the city, trying to find your next clue or trying to escape from the Demons which hunt the lost souls in the city. There will also be some forms of environmental puzzles where you will need to find ways of manipulating your environment of living things within it to get past certain challenges, examples being helping a medium get through a guarded area, or possessing animals or people to get through certain areas.
The Demons that stalk the night are not very smart, they simply move through the environment in a repeating path and do not pose much of a challenge if you are careful. They do the job of adding suspense well, but if you are eager to progress quickly through the story they can be an irritating block to quick progress.
Each area of the game also contains hidden secrets in the form of ghostly collectables, like a saw or a butane gas canister. These items when all collected will reveal a grisly murder or other dark happenings in this area’s past, which make the city feel like a place which has had problems long before their Serial killer raised its head, which can stretch back to several hundred years ago.
Investigation areas are areas which are areas relevant to your investigation or to other spirits, as a ghost you can gain limited information by reading memories of a location or objects, touching a murder weapon can reveal a small amount of information, so can looking at a blood trail. You can also gain information from witnesses by possessing them and reading their thoughts, or using information you already know to jog their memory or seeing through their eyes to peak at their notes or computer screens.
When you find all the required information you then need to link it together and select which parts are relevant and useful, in this way the game makes you yourself figure the case out as Ronan does, which links the gameplay and story very nicely. If you get these sections wrong don’t worry as you will get to try it again and trial and error will get you there eventually, but these sections are not too hard but keep you engaged.
The gameplay is rather repetitive, like most detective/ investigative games, so I was only able to play the game in 1-2 hour bursts at a time. If the gameplay hadn’t linked itself so well into the story, and the story hadn’t kept me so interested I simply wouldn’t have continued playing until the end.
Graphics
As and AMD Gaming Evolved title this game is no graphical slouch, it looks good on most occasions but suffers from some low res textures here and there. All in all the game will not blow your mind graphically, but it doesn’t look bad.
There isn’t anything particularly noteworthy here, as a ghost you don’t manipulate the environment much, apart from messing with some objects with your poltergeist ability or taking collectables. All I can really say is that the environments are well crafted but do not feature enough opportunities to interact with it, apart from investigation aspects, speaking to other ghosts or reading human minds. There is no action, explosions or anything like that, the game is very static but this is due to the gameplay.
Character models are generally well done, main characters have very good models and others can have a notable downgrade in graphical fidelity.
Conclusion
To finish off, all I can say is that this is a game you can only play once. Neither the story nor the gameplay will ever merit a second playthrough. That being said I enjoyed the game, it told a good story and offered a good 6 hours of gameplay for me.
Graphically this game will win no awards, but it will perform well on almost any PC. On that Note the PC port is sound, I had no technical issues, it with a wide range of settings to tinker with and a good set of PC controls.
For the current retail price of £15 on amazon, it is priced well. If you like other detective games or supernatural stories this will be a worthwhile purchase, if not then stay away. The story of this game is the main event here, so if this story doesn’t have you interested, that won’t change so just stay away.
Today we take a look at Murdered Soul Suspect, the ghost detective game developed by Airtight Games and published by Square Enix. Let’s see if this is a worthwhile purchase.
Game Settings and Performance
As always, it is very important to assess the quality of the PC version of the title. I'll start by saying that all the menus are traverse-able by mouse and the in-game controls are pretty well suited mouse and keyboard, but you can use a console controller if you wish.
Sadly when it comes to controls, keys are not rebindable but the default controls are fine. Some extra choice here would be welcome here but the PC controls are very intuitive and I didn’t feel the need to adjust them so +1.
When it comes to Graphical options there is a lot of stuff to work with. Great for users who wish to tweak their performance for whichever framerate or graphical fidelity they prefer. I played the game maxed out at 1440p on an R9 290 at stock speeds, here I experienced a framerate which on most occasions was around 80FPS with noticeable dips to 45 and sometimes reaching as high as 120FPS. This performance is very good, especially the very high levels of AA used. I doubt many Systems will not be able to play this this game at 1080p 60FPS without tinkering with anything but AA setting.
Within the 6 hours it taken to complete the Single player campaign I experienced no crashes or issues of any kind, so the quality of the PC port can’t be described as anything but stellar.
Story
In this game you play as Ronan O’Conner, a criminal turned cop who worked for the Salem Police Dept. You start entering a house and attempt to arrest the man already inside, but you fail to subdue this criminal and you wind up being thrown out a window and as you lay on the ground after the fall the criminal pick up your own gun and shoots you until you are dead. This man turns out to be the infamous “Bell Killer”, a serial killer who hunts Women and has so far evaded the police.
This is where the story truly begins, Ronan has unfinished business on Earth so his Soul cannot depart into the great beyond, he simply must find out who his killer is and stop him. Ronan from here needs to use his powers both as a Detective and as a Ghost in his investigation and finally be able to rest in peace. From here you will move throughout the city, hunting down every lead while simultaneously finding out more about your citys dark past.
When you take your time and take in the areas you walk through you are rewarded by some particularly well written scenes and dialogue, which can easily be missed by players who storm forward towards the main objective.
One good example is finding a TV ghost hunter who is unaware of the ghost standing in front of his camera, or some bystanders who when possessed by Ronan have thoughts like “I wonder of anyone can read minds”.
As a whole the story is a typical detective game story, albeit with a ghostly twist. It is linear from start to finish, without any choices or even multiple endings, but remains interesting throughout. The game is well acted and I was satisfied with the conclusion, which took about 5-6 hours to do. More time can be spent in the game finding in-game collectables and helping other lost souls find peace, but this does not add anything to replayability really. In short Murdered: Soul Suspect is a game you will only play once, as once the story is concluded there is nothing that Merits a replay.
Gameplay
The game has two real states of play, travel and investigation. While traveling you will either be exploring a particular part of the city, trying to find your next clue or trying to escape from the Demons which hunt the lost souls in the city. There will also be some forms of environmental puzzles where you will need to find ways of manipulating your environment of living things within it to get past certain challenges, examples being helping a medium get through a guarded area, or possessing animals or people to get through certain areas.
The Demons that stalk the night are not very smart, they simply move through the environment in a repeating path and do not pose much of a challenge if you are careful. They do the job of adding suspense well, but if you are eager to progress quickly through the story they can be an irritating block to quick progress.
Each area of the game also contains hidden secrets in the form of ghostly collectables, like a saw or a butane gas canister. These items when all collected will reveal a grisly murder or other dark happenings in this area’s past, which make the city feel like a place which has had problems long before their Serial killer raised its head, which can stretch back to several hundred years ago.
Investigation areas are areas which are areas relevant to your investigation or to other spirits, as a ghost you can gain limited information by reading memories of a location or objects, touching a murder weapon can reveal a small amount of information, so can looking at a blood trail. You can also gain information from witnesses by possessing them and reading their thoughts, or using information you already know to jog their memory or seeing through their eyes to peak at their notes or computer screens.
When you find all the required information you then need to link it together and select which parts are relevant and useful, in this way the game makes you yourself figure the case out as Ronan does, which links the gameplay and story very nicely. If you get these sections wrong don’t worry as you will get to try it again and trial and error will get you there eventually, but these sections are not too hard but keep you engaged.
The gameplay is rather repetitive, like most detective/ investigative games, so I was only able to play the game in 1-2 hour bursts at a time. If the gameplay hadn’t linked itself so well into the story, and the story hadn’t kept me so interested I simply wouldn’t have continued playing until the end.
Graphics
As and AMD Gaming Evolved title this game is no graphical slouch, it looks good on most occasions but suffers from some low res textures here and there. All in all the game will not blow your mind graphically, but it doesn’t look bad.
There isn’t anything particularly noteworthy here, as a ghost you don’t manipulate the environment much, apart from messing with some objects with your poltergeist ability or taking collectables. All I can really say is that the environments are well crafted but do not feature enough opportunities to interact with it, apart from investigation aspects, speaking to other ghosts or reading human minds. There is no action, explosions or anything like that, the game is very static but this is due to the gameplay.
Character models are generally well done, main characters have very good models and others can have a notable downgrade in graphical fidelity.
Conclusion
To finish off, all I can say is that this is a game you can only play once. Neither the story nor the gameplay will ever merit a second playthrough. That being said I enjoyed the game, it told a good story and offered a good 6 hours of gameplay for me.
Graphically this game will win no awards, but it will perform well on almost any PC. On that Note the PC port is sound, I had no technical issues, it with a wide range of settings to tinker with and a good set of PC controls.
For the current retail price of £15 on amazon, it is priced well. If you like other detective games or supernatural stories this will be a worthwhile purchase, if not then stay away. The story of this game is the main event here, so if this story doesn’t have you interested, that won’t change so just stay away.
Last edited:
