A new found Joy
Sometimes you have an opinion about something but you don’t really know where that opinion has come from. You can even be so sure that what you know is true. It’s just some knowledge absorbed passively from the zeitgeist.
Well for the longest time, I just knew that Murdered: Soul Suspect was a bad game. I couldn’t tell you why I knew this, but I did and I never really gave it any thought and I never played it, don’t recall watching any reviews or deep dive videos on YouTube either. In the past year, a couple of throwaway mentions on social media and comments by friends about the game really sparked my interest and made me want to check it out and see what I really thought about it.
Without looking up the game at all, I just impulsively ordered it off Ebay. This is one of those great times where I am so pleased I took a chance because this game totally won me over and I think perhaps uncommonly, it was easier to appreciate today than it would have been when it was released in 2014.
I wasn’t exactly wrong with my original knowledge of the game, there was indeed a lot of negativity at the time, looking at reviews they are mostly in the 4/10 to 6/10, even Official PlayStation Magazine UK, a platform I would say were usually fairly soft on review scores, gave the game a 4/10 despite their three prior issues containing preview articles implying it was going to be good.
In the game you play police detective Ronan, who has just been killed and is now a ghost solving his own murder. This is not a spoiler, it happens in the first 5 minutes and is also on the back of the box. The game gives you lots of interesting ghostly mechanics like possessing people, walking through walls, teleportation and interacting mildly with objects.
It took my brain a surprisingly long time to adjust to remembering I can walk through objects and walls and didn’t have to follow the path.
On top of that the game play is mostly a series of small investigation sequences with very basic trial and error detective mechanics which all help to drive the story and central mystery forwards.
I am not going to get deep into my criticisms of the game or mechanics, a lot of the articles and criticisms of the time did exactly that and I think they were right. The general assessment was that the game feels like it is the seed of a great game but that what we got was perhaps just a small, unpolished taste of what could have been and whilst I do actually agree with that, I think what we got was still entertaining.
The story is interesting but very surface level, the characters are predictable tropes, the side quests where you help other ghosts with their unfinished business is never explored for more than five minutes at a time.
Despite the criticisms, this kind of game is exactly the reason I love retro gaming and exploring old catalogues of games. There are hundreds of titles out there I have never played, and they may have problems but they can also have some charm or unique mechanic that you don’t often see elsewhere.
It is a short game. I think I finished the story and got the Platinum trophy in maybe 6 hours (See Trophy Hunter). Being an adult with limited time, a short, tight six hour experience is perfect for me but to understand some of the harsh criticism at the time I have to consider that consumers who picked this over a 30-40 hour open world game with much more replayability, may have felt their money could have gotten more for their money.
Being released in 2014 the game was also released on the next generation consoles as well as the PlayStation 3 but I’d have to say it played pretty well for a backported title. The graphics of the main character models were pretty detailed but the NPCs looked very flat, the text portions did not blend in with the paper on which they were meant to be on and the load times could also be very slow. Fortunately the game doesn’t load too often, but if you die (mega die? You are already a ghost after all?) and reload the last save point, this can take very long to load.
I think if you are on the look out for a short, interesting story-based game for the PlayStation 3 I would definitely recommend it to those who have an open mind about trying out some mechanics that might not be fully fleshed out. I really enjoyed my time with the game and am glad to have played it.