Murdered: Soul Suspect — Or “The Police Are So Incompetent They Have To Die Before They’ll Solve A Case Properly”
When you die, they say your life flashes before your eyes. All of your regrets, all your triumphs. The people you love coming into your life, and being taken from it too soon. Stories etched into your memories like tattoos. A juvenile life of crime, cheating death after being stabbed in a brawl. Finding a woman you love, and choosing to turn over a new leaf. Becoming a member of law enforcement 🐷. The woman you love being taken from you, and a life without her looming before you.
This is what Salem police detective Ronan O’Connor saw as he fell to the ground from a fourth story window. After the death of his beloved Julia, he gained a death wish, and Salem’s mysterious Bell Killer has just granted that wish, putting seven holes into Ronan’s broken body with his own gun. Ronan O’Connor has just become the only good kind of cop: A dead one.
Unfortunately for Ronan, death isn’t the end. As he goes into the light, Julia’s spirit tells him that he still has to solve this case before he can move on. With a reunion with the love of his life just out of reach, Ronan is determined to solve this case now more than ever, and bring the Bell Killer to justice before he kills again.
2014’s Murdered: Soul Suspect — which I’m just going to be calling Soul Suspect, because it sounds less weird than using “Murdered” as a noun over and over — is not a good game. It is enjoyable, though, in its own way. Adam Smith, writing for Rock Paper Shotgun, called Soul Suspect one of the worst games he’s ever enjoyed. As far as the “Recent News” section for the game on Steam is concerned, that 2016 article is the last time anyone of note bothered to talk about the game.
I’m nobody of note, though, so I’m going to expand on that Why You Should Play article with my own thoughts on this cluttered mess of a game that epitomizes the idea of a good story told badly.
Except that Soul Suspect doesn’t actually have that good of a story to begin with?
Being Murdered
Soul Suspect starts out with a really incredible opening sequence that doesn’t even bother messing around. There’s a title card saying this is Salem, Massachusetts, helpfully informing us that this is, in fact, the present day. This is followed by jarring, poorly lit clips of bloody poems on walls and extreme close ups of photographs of evidence close ups of body parts marked with a mysterious bell symbol and other spooky things.
You get the relevant information right away, and told to you in an engaging way as a reporter’s voice talks about the serial killer going around known as the Bell Killer. The police are useless as they often are, and everyone is scared.
Cut to a man falling out of a window in slow motion, glass falling around him as he talks about how he grew up on the street and that made him feel invincible. He’s falling to certain death, but still he tries to pull out his gun and shoot at his killer. As Ronan falls, he flashes through the important moments of his life, cutting right through the normally very time consuming process of showing instead of telling. Its actually pretty clever to use the trope of someone’s life flashing before their eyes to deliver backstory as a montage.
But, what goes up must come down, and as the flashes end, Ronan picks himself off the ground and immediately goes to get back into the fight, only to find himself unable to do something as simple as open a door. When an old woman comes out to hear what the fuss was, she knocks him on his ass with the door and looks right through him. To his corpse.
While Ronan plays with his body, trying to wear his floppy meat and stay alive, his out of body experience is made permanent by the serial killer he was after casually picking up Ronan’s own dropped gun and unloading it into his still warm chest. With each bullet, a glowing wound erupts from Ronan’s back, and these angry red holes through his chest stick around, making him stand out from every other ghost in the game. Not that his Don Corleon by way of Hot Topic outfit, complete with a fedora, doesn’t already make him stand out as someone with Character Design instead of a generic model, but you just sort of have to suspend disbelief that an adult human being in his thirties or forties would dress like someone’s Gaia Online avatar.
With his chances of making it out of this alive ended seven times over, a wave washes over Ronan like he’s paper being burned and the colour drains from him, making him pale and translucent. The world itself goes through a similar change, and ghostly structures that weren’t there before are suddenly visible to him. He’s well and truly dead now, which means its time to go into the light, where Julia tells him that he has to set right what once went wrong if he ever wants to make it to heaven, and solve this case.
I actually love these first five minutes or so of the game. Its a really well done opening scene, even though its filled with so many cliches. The guy with the violent upbringing on the mean streets of [checks notes] Salem, Massachusetts finds love, becomes a cop to turn his life around, loses his love, becomes a renegade with a death wish. Ronan’s outfit is ridiculous, and I can only imagine someone would dress like that if that’s how they thought detectives are supposed to dress. The mysterious and possibly supernatural serial killer, going into the light, solving your own murder. Just because something is cliche doesn’t mean its bad, and I love the way Soul Suspect just throws as many cliches as they can into the pot.
There’s a bit of very controlled moments of interactivity in this intro, all of which is little more than moving the stick forward or pressing a button. I see what they were going for, and its obvious they were keeping the camera and movement restricted to keep the player from seeing Ronan’s corpse, but I feel like that reveal of “oh no, you’re dead!” already sort of loses its touch when you’re playing a game with a ghost on the title screen. If anything, what I dislike about it is that these sort of “close ups” don’t ever really happen elsewhere in the game, which is a shame because they really seem like they added a lot to LA Noire, and this game could have used that.
This intro may actually be one of my favourite game intros, period. Unfortunately, this kind of pace isn’t kept up through the rest of the game, and even with the ridiculous segments of moving Ronan’s hand to the door handle or trying to line his limbs up correctly, this is a narrative high point for the game.
No Rest For the Dead
Ronan dies, is told to solve his murder, gets a lecture on ghost powers and demons from a little puritan ghost, goes back to the crime scene, learns nothing meaningful, goes back to the apartment he was thrown out of, realizes that a girl named Joy was a witness to his murder, tracks her down to the church, and learns Joy, like her mother, is a medium. Joy’s mother, a medium who works with the police, has also been missing. Joy uses her ghost powers to force him back as she runs away, but Ronan tracks her down to the police station where she’s been caught and being interrogated about her mother’s disappearance. Ronan helps her steal her mother’s cryptic journal back.
The journal leads them to an incredibly poorly laid out cemetery where they meet a mute and waterlogged ghost named Sophia, a previous victim of the Bell Killer. She flees from Ronan, who chases after her, only to realize she was intentionally leading him to a tree. The ghost implores Ronan to touch her arm and when he does he watches her death play out as the Bell Killer uses an improvised dunking chair. As he does, he demands to know about a contract that Sophia made. This leads to another clue in the journal about a woman named Iris who survived the killer. Iris is held in a place called Lux Aeterna, an asylum that Ronan is familiar with.
The mental hospital is just as cliche as everything else in the game, and Ronan and Joy find that Iris is a raving lunatic, driven to draw on the walls in crayon. When Ronan tries to possess her to read her mind, he learns that she’s also a medium. And possessed by the ghost of her sister, Rose. They were both kidnapped by the Bell Killer together, but Rose sacrificed herself to help get Iris away and was burned at the stake, leaving her ghost charred and on fire.
There’s almost a confrontation with Rose, but that might have been interesting, so instead Ronan points out that as the stereotype demands, Iris is going to be lobotomized if they don’t all escape. Rose and Iris explain that the Bell Killer was demanding they admit to making a contract with demons. Ronan then has Joy, Iris, and Rose go back to the church. Ronan recognizes that he’s seen the stake Rose was burned at before, on a museum flyer for a Salem Witch Trials exhibit in Joy’s mother’s notebook. Ronan, a native of Salem, Massachusetts, then goes to the museum’s gala to learn about the thing the town of Salem is most famous for.
Joy meets up with him, Ronan chastises her for not staying with Iris. In addition to the history lesson, Ronan realizes that mediums were seen as witches, and that Salem has a history of mediums working with the police and also a history of mediums being murdered by serial killers. He also gets a vision of Baxter, a rival on the police force who hates him and the man who worked with Joy’s mother, hiding evidence in the museum. Ronan sends Joy back to the church and is all set to go snoop on Baxter when he sees police cars speeding back to the church.
Back at the church, the Bell Killer has killed Iris by crushing her with a big stone statue, similar to the way that people were crushed by rocks during the witch trials. He also killed the priest, as well as a small wedding party, and Ronan’s visions of the attack show that the killer had supernatural strength, capable of throwing people around and chasing Iris out the third story window when she jumped and broke her leg. The ghost of Iris and Rose then confront Ronan and tell him that he isn’t to blame and not to hold tight to what’s keeping him here, and then are removed from the plot by passing on.
Ronan leaves Joy in the custody of his brother in law, Rex, reasoning that she’ll be safer if the police arrest her, and follows up on a vision of a witch trials judge’s house that he got off of a key the Bell Killer conveniently dropped. There he finds a panda, and believes it to be Baxter. Inside the house that is filled with just so much empty space, Ronan finds the killer’s secret hideout filled with centuries old newspaper clippings, photos, trophies, and spooky children’s rhyme style poems written in red paint. In the basement he finds Baxter’s corpse and ghost, who gives Ronan more clues. The Bell Killer said he already knows death, and that the instrument of his death would kill again tonight. Ronan has Baxter go get Joy’s mother from the safe house he stashed her in, and Ronan goes deeper into the basement where he realizes that Abigail, the puritan girl from the beginning of the game is the Bell Killer and lied to get mediums executed before she was found out and hanged by the court herself.
Ronan overhears a cop on Baxter’s radio asking if Dispatch has seen Rex, and realizes that he must be possessed by Abigail and has now kidnapped Joy to murder her. The instrument of her death must be the gallows that Abigail was hanged from, and Ronan rushes to the museum once again for a final confrontation where Rex is revealed to be the Bell Killer. Ronan stops Abigail by possessing Joy and using her ghostly scream to throw Abigail out of Rex before he can pull the gallows lever. Ronan then grabs Abigail and forces her to relive her own death, but she then turns it around on Ronan and shows him his death and reveals the last pieces of the puzzle.
Rex was the Bell Killer, and threw Ronan out of the window.
But Baxter was also the Bell Killer, and burned Rose.
And Ronan was also the Bell Killer, and killed Sophia.
Then Abigail tries to use her demon controlling powers and Ronan basically just throws her into her own demon puddle and she gets pulled into, I don’t know, hell or something. The day is saved, the murderer is dealt with, Joy and Cassandra reunite, and Ronan finally gets to go to heaven or whatever. Also Joy will probably help Rex cover up the murders he did so none of those families will ever find closure but I guess that’s not important.
Murder Weapons
So the story is a bit all over the place, but I want to talk about the actual game itself a bit before going deeper into the weeds. Much as the overall concept is a good story told poorly, the mechanics are in a similar place. There are so many interesting ideas, but their implementation is not done well most of the time, if at all.
If I were to describe Murdered: Soul Suspect with a genre, it wouldn’t be “Action” or “Action Adventure”, which is what Wikipedia and Metacritic list it as, though Wikipedia calling it a Stealth game feels like more of a technicality. Soul Suspect is more of an Adventure game, in the vein of the point and click kind from the 90s, not one of the more excitement focused Action Adventure games like God of War or Breath of the Wild. There’s very little “Action” to be had, and when there is, its frustrating stealth sequences.
Your primary method of interacting with the world is by walking around and pressing the right trigger to activate your ghostly powers, whether its Possession to get inside the mind of a living human (literally), or Poltergeist to make electronics go on the fritz. Most of the world of the game takes place in overly large, empty settings, with very little to see or do besides using Possession to hear the meaningless and often repetitive thoughts of NPCs that barely even move from their place.
Ghost abilities are all contextual aside from the teleport, but considering that’s useless for anything besides getting to hard to reach places, it might as well be. The game is very empty, even in the too large and mazelike area that serves as a hub. There are a crap ton of meaningless knicknacks to pick up, ranging from the memories of Ronan’s wife, Julia, that fill in a lot of her personality and help flesh out just why Ronan is so in love with her. There are also artifacts that tell about the Bell Killer’s other victims, and historical facts about Salem or the Witch Trials. All of these feel like the kind of thing that a better game would use to give the world character or serve as interesting worldbuilding that tells the player something significant. That’s not the case in Soul Suspect. Even the longest Julia memories are little more than blurbs. Everything is just a short bit of text, often little more than a factoid. Its disappointing. Especially considering there are 255 of these scattered throughout the game. 91 of which are location specific bits and bobs that are hidden in each area. These at least give audio logs of people telling stories of their ghostly encounters.
Where the game really shines, and frankly the only parts you could really call a game, are the investigations. They’re far from perfect, and mostly consist of awkwardly walking around and hoping that you get a button prompt, continuing the tradition set by pixel hunting games of days gone by. Compared to what Telltale was doing at the same time to revolutionize the concept of an adventure game and bring them into the modern day, Soul Suspect feels out of place. It also doesn’t really measure up to LA Noire, which years earlier had similar investigative gameplay, but where Soul Suspect involves pressing X to look at something, LA Noire has the player picking things up and zooming in and turning ticket stubs over.
Investigations are usually contained within a small area, helpfully marked with a tracking icon if you move too far away from them, and most often focus around finding clues to essentially fill in one to three blanks prompted by the overarching question of the investigation. Some of the main cases of a chapter will involve multiple parts to the investigation, with clues coming back later, and some maintaining relevance all throughout the game. Unfortunately most of them are random cruft, that don’t even add to any larger sense of narrative.
The Museum is especially egregious here, with one investigation section having something like fourteen clues, only three of which will be relevant in the end. Considering death seems to have given Ronan some form of psychometry, it would have been nice if many of the clues that existed simply as red herrings were at least things that had strong emotional resonance or told a story of their own, even if they weren’t relevant to his investigation. Instead the clues that are actual red herrings are maybe half of all the potential clues, with the rest being random objects in the restoration room that must have caught Ronan’s eye.
When you’ve gotten enough clues — some of which might have come from just looking at an object, some of which might have come from revealing ghostly echoes and watching visions play out, or one of the less used mechanics — you’re able to try to solve the investigation. Sometimes this automatically goes to the end, but most often you’ll be given a clue cloud of everything you’ve collected, with unfound clues marked with a lock. You then fill out the “what happened here” prompt by selecting one to three clues, in the right order. Some of these can get frustrating, with some clues feeling like they really should be applicable, but many of them are simply too easy. Nothing gets to the level of rubber chickens with pulleys in the middle or the moon logic of traditional adventure games, though I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
Sometimes this clue cloud mechanic will show up as Ronan thinks to himself what to do next, or even wonders what the importance of the church he just walked into is, having apparently forgotten it. There’s only one of these moments that really feels like it lives up to the potential that it could have had, and actually makes the player — by which I mean me, at least — feel like they’re onto something.
While the main verb for investigations is just Investigate, which results in Ronan bending down to examine an object, causing floating white letters to appear and giving a sentence long blurb about what it is, inconsistently the game changes it up. These segments are too short and inconsequential to be considered minigames, but they have the ludic feeling of a minigame with the way the controls change.
Many of these are activated by Possessing individual humans hanging around whatever investigation area there is. Normally this ability is borderline useless, and simply allows you to read the mind of whoever you’re possessing, which is fun and interesting at first, but you quickly learn that for every interesting mental conversation you overhear, there will be twenty other people with completely vapid thoughts. Maybe all of once, Possession will let you Eavesdrop, listening in on the gossip as the cop who hates Ronan badmouths him while the body is still cold. Used slightly more is Peer, which puts you right into the eyes of the person you’re voyeuristically mind reading, but each of the few times this happens, all it does is give you a one action minigame where you choose from one of three choices to collect as a clue.
The most interesting, but still underutilized, ability when possessing someone is to Influence them, which brings up the same menu as at the close of a case, where you’re presented with a spread of all the relevant clues in this investigation laid out in a random order in your little clue cloud and you’re asked which of them would make this person think of something specific.
There are also moments where instead of simply gaining the clue from pressing X when Ronan looks at it, you’ll be treated to something similar to Peek, only this time Ronan will be presented with a phantom sound and have to choose which word relates to it. There aren’t any subtitles for these sounds, so I can only assume these sections aren’t very friendly to people with hearing issues. Or at least, that would be the case if they weren’t all incredibly simple to the point of it being tedious. After seeing a vision of the Bell Killer dropping a key into a vent, then possessing a cat to travel through the vent, and finally falling out of the vent and knocking the thing in the vent onto the floor, which of the three items is making the metallic clattering sound? Is it the Fork? Or maybe the Spoon? Or could it be the big bulky key that has more detail than either of them combined?
Oh, also you can possess cats to travel through air ducts and get into hard to reach places. In a feature that’s emblematic of the way that Murdered has many good ideas that all feel half-finished and underused, possessing a cat (and all cats in Salem are black cats, of course) gives you access to the Meow command, except no matter how often you climb onto the furniture and meow at people, no one will pet you. I mean, come on, Airtight Games, Okami came out six years earlier. Don’t let me be an animal and have humans ignore my presence. Let the player get pet!
One of the most frustrating little minigames occurs most often when you Reveal a ghostly echo — a sort of statue in the spiritual world — and examine that. These play out psychic visions and then stop halfway through to darken the screen and overlay a shifting word cloud where you pick out what emotion or action is being experienced in this scene. The game is nowhere near as graphically polished as LA Noire was, so characters don’t have that same level of facial animation, but it doesn’t matter, because all of the correct responses are overt. Is the woman running from the serial killer and barreling into a crowd of people Calm? Or is she Frightened? Choosing one of the correct answers will also eliminate a few incorrect answers, and its just… not fun. It feels insulting, in a way. This feels like something for children, but this is a game rated M. For mature. I know people running away from serial killers aren’t calm.
None of these mechanical quirks — aside from not being able to get attention as a cat — are necessarily bad, but none of them are finished. They feel half-baked, and there are many moments where the mechanics shift to something that’s never seen again. The moments at the very beginning of the game, where you actually guide Ronan’s hand to the door, or to touching the face of his body, and the way you have to align the limbs of his ghost with the limbs of his corpse. None of that is necessarily interesting or mechanically satisfying, but it at least feels like they wanted to do more than just have Ronan stumble around until you get close enough and center the camera on the object in just the right way to have Ronan examine it, and maybe have a psychic vision.
Like with the narrative, the gameplay just feels like its not living up to its potential. Pun intended. I’d really have liked to see many of the same ideas, but more fleshed out. Or even just better ideas entirely. This is a very interesting detective game, mechanically, in some places, but ultimately its shallow. The investigations aren’t even in very large areas. Few if any of them cover more than one room without being broken up into separate investigations. One of the hub map investigations has you going to a second location, but its only just down the street. Every little puzzle minigame, like choosing words or figuring out which clue will lead you to another clue through Influence, also has a badge rating.
Badges mean nothing. There is no reward for getting three stars. There are no experience points or upgrades. There is no achievement. There are no rewards. You can’t even lose all three badges, so its a 1 to 3 rating of whether you solved the puzzle in one try, in two tries, or in infinite tries. All the badges do is taunt you if you Peek at a cop’s notebook and think Ronan should be interested in the missing residents of the apartment he went to, one of whom you know will later be an important character, only for Ronan to single mindedly be interested in other things.
“Haha, you fool, you were too incompetent to be a master detective.” Fuck you, badges. Compared to Ronan I’m Sherlock Holmes.
Dead on Arrival
I swear there’s things about this game that I like, but unfortunately the investigations aren’t the only form of gameplay that Soul Suspect has other than walking around trying to find collectibles like some early 3D platformer. The game isn’t an action adventure in any respect, but it does occasionally stop everything to throw you into “combat” sections that just barely justify classifying the game as Stealth.
Just about once an area, often in between the sections of an investigation or when you’ve finished one and need to get back to the hub area, you’ll be met with a bone chilling shriek and have to face demons. These are the ghosts that have been trapped and unable to move on for so long that they’ve gone feral. They exist only to hunger, and ghosts like Ronan who still have their sanity look delicious. If they catch you, they’ll make like Alfonso Cuaron’s Dementors and suck out your soul.
Demons patrol in set patterns, usually very short ones, and frustratingly close together. You can sneak past them and they won’t track you down, but getting by them is frustrating, and if you’re going to kill a few of them, you might as well kill them all. The only way to manage this is by walking up behind them so that they can’t see you and holding down the right trigger as Ronan sucks away at their life force instead of the other way around. Then you have to match some randomized button press and analogue stick direction combination. Soul Suspect is so far from “Action Adventure” that even its stealth kills are a quick time event.
The stealth kills are also the only way to interact with the demons. It isn’t a long interaction, but especially when two, or even three demons are close together it can certainly get tense. Its not tense in a good way, though, its tense in the way of “I don’t want to redo this a third time”. It could just be because I’m impatient, but many times it felt like I was barely given enough time before one demon turned his back and when another would be coming around. It doesn’t help much that as you tear the demons apart, they howl in pain, which really feels counter to the concept of stealth.
The game does have one stealth feature that somewhat helps. Ronan can Hide in the ghostly leftovers of previous demon victims, the post-death equivalent to hiding in a restaurant’s dumpster. You can even jump between the hiding spots, if they’re close together enough.
But that’s sort of where the problem lies. They aren’t. Sometimes you’ll have to jump out and leg it to another cluster of shadows, and you’ll always have to leave to tear apart a demon. Once you’re unlucky enough to be caught, you’ll have to run to one of the Hiding spaces on a timer, because the demon that spotted you will keep sucking out your soul no matter how far you run until you jump in a trash can. Or maybe its a toilet. Then its a matter of jumping between them to keep the demon from finding you as they search through the trash. They jump between each Hiding space in a cluster, and I’m going to be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever gotten them to lose track of me.
As I write this, I’m wondering if maybe I’m just not very good at it, or that I was doing it wrong. When you use your demon detection senses, ghosts on the other side of walls — and for some reason only the ones on the other side of walls — are shown in red, along with their vision cones. The vision cones certainly seem short, displaying a myopia that makes the Genome Soldiers look like they’ve got 20/20 vision, but every time I run out to tackle one, I’m always caught by another. I never had fun during these sequences, not once. At most I grew to tolerate them.
The only time I even had a feeling of satisfaction was when I just ignored two or three of them and left the Church. It gave me a feeling of “heh, dumbasses”.
These sequences could have been interesting if there was more to them. Ronan doesn’t have traditional stealth capabilities. He doesn’t crouch or press against walls — though the ability to walk through them is incredibly satisfying, assuming you don’t get caught. There are ghostly ravens just hanging out in a few places, and you can interact with them to distract demons, but they only really grab the attention of one of them. You can’t even disrupt the patterns of demons. Metal Gear Solid had guards following down footprints in the snow or that were wet back in 1998. But stealth doesn’t seem like it was an actual priority, just something that was tacked on because combat of some sort is more or less a demand of the demographic.
I will say this, though: The horrifying shriek that starts every demon section sure is fucking pants wettingly terrifying, especially with a good pair of headphones (sponsor me, Raycon). The music is also unnerving, and it sticks around well after you’ve pulled apart the last demon, which always has me gripping the see through walls button and looking around every which way, expecting I’ll walk through a wall and come face to face with another angry red ghost.
I don’t even hate the demons conceptually or anything. They have a very unique look for a Western ghost story, highlighting the Square-Enix involvement. A sort of Hungry Ghost. They’re just very boring. The more interesting version of them are the Lost Souls that show up as very overt barriers that mostly only exist to make you go around the long way. They’re big, angry red puddles of bloody sludge and darkness, with grasping hands reaching out to grab you. They present more of a problem, and in a few places getting past them is more interesting than getting past the actual free floating demons. Even here, its mostly rather simple, with Ronan possessing someone as they move back and forth over the patch of roiling angry ectoplasm.
Land of the Dead
The ghosts of Soul Suspect exist within a limbo space, trapped on earth until they can find absolution. As far as I can tell, the game doesn’t give it a name, but the Fandom wiki calls it Dusk. Its reminiscent of Chronicles of Darkness’ Twilight, the liminal space that ghosts, spirits, angels of the God-Machine, and other ephemeral beings exist in, not quite a place so much as a state of being. Much like in Chronicles of Darkness games, its not just the ghosts of people who are in Dusk. The wreckage of an old steam ship lies on the quiet shoreline of Salem. Years of history pile up in pieces, from the wreckage of burning buildings still on fire, to rickety shacks. A ghostly car that was totaled still sits on the edge of the brickwork it crashed into.
I’ve talked about it before, but I really love the Chronicles of Darkness games, and one of my favourite gamelines back when it was simply called the (new) World of Darkness was Geist: The Sin-eaters. That’s a game where you play a character who, like Ronan, dies. Only unlike Ronan, you don’t stay that way and instead a ghost representing something archetypal and symbolic makes an offer with you to form a bond that will let you both experience life again. From their Geist and being someone permanently touched by death, Sin-eaters gain the ability to see and interact with ghosts within Twilight.
The first time I played Murdered, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Geist, and Twilight. A separate place, just beneath the skin of the material world but still a part of it. Ghosts can walk through walls because in Twilight those walls might not even be there. The houses of Salem are all consecrated, a ludonarrative excuse to keep you from walking into every building, but once you get inside of a location you can walk through almost everything. Furniture, walls, people. Even out in the sprawling hub map, you can move through fences and trees as if you had noclip turned on. All of this is really just a long way of saying that being a ghost is extremely my jam, and I love it. The one good thing about demon sections is when you simply walk through a wall after a demon passes by to pull it apart.
Of course, as with everything else in the game, its still unpolished. It doesn’t feel as good as it could be. You clip through walls, but the camera doesn’t. That large, sprawling hub world is also filled with ghostly detritus that turns the whole town into a maze of blue-grey junk from centuries past that makes it seem much larger than it actually is. The ruins of an entire building stand in your way in one place, and it doesn’t really serve a purpose except to pad the length by making you walk longer than you have to. Many of the levels don’t have very much to them in terms of interesting things. The police station and Judgement House levels are huge, but none of that size is used for anything except hiding collectibles.
This is a problem that plagues the game all over. In the Apartments level, everything is clustered together and its exciting. The people you come across have interesting thoughts, even if its only two of them, and even talk to each other. You get to see people playing cards, and hearing the woman of the group bragging, and each of the player’s thoughts on the game. You get to hear the old couple arguing, and hear the man’s thoughts on his wife playing lookie loo and looking out the window at your corpse.
The Apartments feel like an actual place, with stories and people who are living their lives. Its fun to voyeuristically watch them, and even to Possess them and hear what’s on their mind. As one of the first other ghosts you meet says: “Come on… don’t look so lost. Take a look around or something. You know… spy a little. Its not like anyone is going to stop you.”
Unfortunately, that sort of wears off. Almost everyone in the hub world is quiet, and even their thoughts are vapid. “What’s that game, the one with the woman who raids tombs?” After the first time through the hub world, you probably won’t care about what people are thinking, because it frankly isn’t that interesting.
This dips and rises throughout the first half of the game or so. The game isn’t broken into specific chapters, but each section of the game takes place at a different location throughout Salem, and only the Church is ever visited twice. The first time comes after Ronan realizes Joy saw him get murdered, and he tracks her down to the attic. This is maybe one of the more interesting levels in the game, because the roundabout busywork you do actually feels interesting. Actually getting up to the attic feels like a puzzle, not so much a maze. Figuring out how to get across a patch of Lost Souls, and then Possessing a cat to climb through vents and up along conveniently placed obstacles isn’t exactly challenging, but its interesting at least.
But like with the hub world, once you run around as a cat for a bit, it becomes obvious just how uninteresting it is. The majority of the NPCs just sit around saying the same things over again. They also don’t respond to you when you meow. Pet me, damnit! Give me pets! You’d think the duct repair man would at least say something about the cat that goes running into the vents while he’s explaining how they have to inspect them to make sure no animals are trapped inside every so often.
The one bit of remotely interesting conversation is about the wedding party. When you come back the second time, you have to investigate the scene of a massacre as the Bell Killer went through and murdered everyone in his way to get to Iris. Its not really a big thing, but it is at least something. Being able to revisit the area means that you get to see how it changes.
The police station comes next, and its just so empty. There’s barely even anything to interact with or anyone to Possess in most of the rooms. A police station at night is not very exciting. The gimmick for the level involves helping Joy sneak through the area and break out of holding. Its a really cool idea. A stealth level where you’re not sneaking yourself, you’re an invisible and incorporeal ghost helping someone else sneak through a police station’s bullpen to essentially steal some evidence and escape without getting caught. But in practice all you have to do is use Poltergeist on the right electronic device to distract a cop.
This level could have really been interesting. The level does have a few collectibles that tell Ronan’s backstory, but I’ll save discussing that for later. The gimmick of helping Joy sneak through the level and avoid detection is used again later at the Asylum, and the last leg of that level even has Iris tagging along as you break her out of the loony bin, distracting orderlies, fritzing electronic locks, and turning off cameras. But even having two people to worry about doesn’t make that reiteration of the idea work much better. It doesn’t even feel significantly more challenging.
In both versions of the stealth section, all you really do is Poltergeist the right item. Maybe you might have to do two things at once. That’s the only iteration it gets. The cops or orderlies don’t even have movement patterns. There’s no way to disrupt them, other than preset Poltergeist objects.
Also for some reason half the computers in the precinct are just the main menu screen of Deus Ex. Come on, guys. No wonder you haven’t caught this serial killer. ACAB.
What feels like the longest level is the Cemetery, and it might even be the best one, at least narratively. Despite the graveyard being closed at sundown, apparently no one in Salem cares, because the cemetery is packed. It probably has the most ghosts in the game, and it even has lots of little scenes to watch. A camera crew shooting a ghost hunting show that can’t see the ghost waving at the camera. A tour group learning about the history of the cemetery, with a killer’s ghost in tow. Lovers on a date in the creepiest place in town. Teens trying to break into a crypt, and the edgy incel ghost inside who accidentally shot himself playing around with his grandad’s guns.
The typical investigation into the serial murderer is interrupted by the victim appearing and running away from Ronan, who spends most of the level chasing her through the cemetery. The level is not even remotely laid out in a reasonable way, and halfway through you come across the remains of a plague hospital for victims of the Spanish Flu just in the middle of the cemetery. The level has lots of interesting stories, but the way you traverse through it is just a frustrating jog along a spiraling path, with a break for demon time.
The meeting with Sophia here at the end of it almost makes it all worth it, though. Its easily one of the best sequences in the game, especially with the way the game’s third act twist recontextualizes the way she reacted to Ronan.
In the final acts of the game, it becomes less and less interested in the interesting little conversations you can overhear. After Ronan goes to the museum, you don’t even get to interact with any other ghosts, at least not until Baxter dies. The museum itself is filled with people wandering around a gala opening of Salem Witch Trials history, but none of the conversation here is interesting. There aren’t ghosts of serial killers watching on creepily, there are no stalkers pining for unrequited love. Just boring normal people, talking about the witch trials. And a very melodramatic play.
The Museum level is broken up into two investigations, with more of the game’s meandering in between and a big empty space that later gets filled with demons. The museum has a visually interesting set piece between them, where the ghost of a train repeatedly blares through, cutting one end of a hallway off. You have to use the teleport to hop to little safe nooks as the train passes. The dichotomy between the ghostly remains of the previous building and the current one is neat, but its barely a blip, and its the only time it happens in the game. I don’t think that every building should have been something else in the past, but its just disappointing that this one doesn’t lean into it more. The collectibles in the Museum give you a story about a ghostly event on the train tracks on the way to Salem, but actual train station ephemera is just that one place.
The penultimate level of the game is the Judgement House, where John Hathorne was said to keep witches in his basement, torturing them before they were executed for their crimes. This is mostly just the lore of the game’s version of Salem, as far as I can tell. The level feels empty. Its literally just a house. An empty house, with ghostly walls that keep the player from simply walking straight through every room from any angle. There are a bunch of collectibles I didn’t bother to even look for hidden in those rooms, but there’s no one to overhear, there’s no ghosts to talk to, there’s just the killer’s hideout. A few places at least have bloody poems on the wall, but these are mostly too blurry to read even at the highest resolution, and surprise, they’re yet another collectible.
The house is split into two sections with a demon encounter in between, and the wine cellar is large and empty with nothing there except Baxter’s corpse, followed by one last investigation in the tiny little basement.
Something that the game seriously lacks is clutter. Specifically interactable clutter. I remember when I was a little tween playing Monkey Island games, making sure to get a description of everything I could, just to hear Guybrush’ thoughts on them. Ronan doesn’t do that. The levels don’t have anything interesting in them at all except investigations. Sometimes the investigations have clues that don’t matter, but rarely are they interesting in any way.
The thing that struck me the most whenever I had to move between levels is just how frustrating it was to get from one level to the next. You always have to walk back the way you came. Even in the Cemetery and Asylum levels, where you do get to loop around and take a shortcut, you still have to deal with the hub world and walk through a frustrating maze of ghostly objects and real ones.
Ghost Stories
I actually like the story of Soul Suspect, for the most part. Like I said, it starts out incredibly strong. Seeing the character die in the first moments of the game and watching their life flash before their eyes is an amazing intro. It makes catching the Bell Killer into something personal for Ronan, because its his killer, and since he’s your avatar, its your killer.
I also really do like the climax, and its twists and turns. But as with a lot of the other parts of the game, I think it stumbles a lot in the execution, and some of its bigger moments and even its underlying themes don’t really feel as earned as the writers seem to think they are. Some of the biggest problems center around Ronan himself, although not all of them do.
Ronan’s motivation is to catch the man who killed him, but more than that he wants to pass through the veil and reunite with his lost love. Julia is more of a motivation than simply getting revenge. The player doesn’t really know Julia though. We see how much Ronan loves her in the introduction, between the flashbacks of his life and the tattoos he gets to show his commitment to her, and the way he darkens the rose tattoo when she dies, and later in the way that he’s so glad to see her again when he heads towards the light. When you visit the cemetery, before leaving Ronan chooses to go see Julia’s grave, and sees Rex placing flowers down, telling her how Ronan was killed.
He even snaps at Joy when she argues with him at the museum, worrying that her mother was killed, saying that Cassandra has only been gone for a few days, but if he doesn’t solve the case, he’ll never see Julia again. This game isn’t exactly Oscar worthy, but its a really good scene that highlights what Ronan has on the line. The problem is that we, the player, can’t really share that motivation because we don’t know Julia.
That is, unless you scavenge around for collectibles. One set of them is dozens of Julia’s thoughts, scattered around Dusk like torn out journal pages. Each one of them gives more information about Julia and Ronan’s relationship. There are even a few — far too few — ghostly remnants of memory that show little flashes of them being happy together. These are barely even cutscenes, just static models with too much editing to make them seem dynamic, with a little voiceover, but they’re good. They show more of the personality of a character who’s in some ways integral to the plot but also almost entirely absent from it.
Most of the notes telling Julia’s thoughts are too short. They don’t have the same punch as audiologs that you’d get in more polished games. They’re not even audiologs, they’re all just three or four sentences at most. Its touching that Ronan knows what Lux Aeternia is because Julia had some kind of mental illness. But you really can’t do more than just guess at that or make an assumption unless you find the note that says how glad Julia is that Ronan came with her to the asylum, or the one that tells how him being around helps her. What mental illness did she have? I don’t know. What effect did it have on Ronan, and how was it “hard for him”? I don’t know. If there was a memory related to that, I never found it. Maybe the game never says, and just hopes the player can fill in their own idea.
Another big problem is Ronan’s character arc. The one he had before he died, because he doesn’t really seem to have changed all that much over the course of the game. He was a kid who lived on the mean streets of [checks notes] Salem. His family is said to all be criminals, but what kind of crime they’re involved in is never said. Ronan got in trouble for stealing cars and getting into fights. And then he met Julia, and turned that around.
Except there’s the elephant in the room. Or should I say the pig. Ronan turns his life around by becoming a cop. Playing this game in the Summer of 2020 when the police have been brutalizing protesters for months now with no end in sight during a pandemic, federal agents are snatching people off the streets of Portland and elsewhere in an act of state terrorism and extreme surveillance, and Chicago is lifting its bridges to keep the poors from coming downtown to protest and/or riot like a castle pulling up its drawbridges to protect the nobility from the serfs, its hard to like Ronan or any of the other characters when you remember that they’re part of the oppressive institution of policing.
Its not like there weren’t problems with the police before this. There always have been, but Liberalism just sort of tacitly accepts and even endorses the brutality of the police. I don’t even think that this game is intentional “copaganda”, but instead is an instance of the liberal inability to question the status quo. The original idea for it was “what if John McClain died?” We, as a society, just accept that the police are the good guys.
The strangest part of that belief is that we also accept that the police are violent and brutal. Even in Murdered, none of the police are nice people. Ronan is certainly charming, and at the beginning of each level he gives a hardboiled description of the location, but he’s singleminded and kind of hateful. Its hard to understand why a person like Julia would even like Ronan when even as a cop, there’s plenty of evidence that he’s pretty shitty. One news article even has him breaking a suspect’s arm. He’s cleared of any wrongdoing by an internal investigation, and we’re just supposed to accept that because he’s the protagonist. The police have to push and be violent sometimes, that’s just how it is. You can see this even in other police procedurals that really are more overtly copaganda, like Law and Order: SVU’s Detective Stabler.
Stabler is an angry, hateful person to anyone that he suspects is a criminal, and when he’s proven wrong he rarely apologizes. In fact, more often than not, he’ll be vindicated when a suspect who was previously thought to be innocent — or even who was innocent at the time — goes on to commit a crime. Usually murder, because even though this is the sex crimes show, murder is dramatic. When he does turn out to be wrong or gets someone killed, he’ll at most give a grave, forlorn “whoopsie daisy” look. But the narrative rarely lingers on that. If Stabler is wrong, it often turns out to be the stinger of the episode, to show that sometimes you can’t win them all. He can even be harsh with victims that he thinks aren’t cooperating enough. But he’s our hero, and he’s the Bad Cop, but in our society we just accept that Bad Cops are actually good cops without thinking about just how many people get arrested for things they didn’t do or get coerced into confessions by violent cops who think that criminals don’t deserve rights and that anyone they suspect must be a criminal.
The police are treated as good guys in Soul Suspect. Even Baxter, who at one point becomes a suspect, is treated as being a bad person and a bastard, but not a bad cop, even though he still did something to get demoted down to a uniformed officer from a detective on the Bell Killer case. I’m honestly not sure the game ever says. He hates Ronan, and Rex decks him for it, but in the end he’s vindicated and treated as Not That Bad A Guy™.
The one subversion for this might be the game’s twist, which I actually do think is really good, but I don’t think it set it up enough. At the end of the game, Baxter is shot by the Bell Killer, and joins Ronan in the Dusk, leaving the identity of the Bell Killer uncertain. During the penultimate investigation, Ronan learns that the little Puritan girl from the beginning of the game is the Bell Killer, having drawn her mark in the dirt when she was being sentenced to death by Judge Hathorne for all of her false accusations. She had been manipulating the village of Salem into engaging in a Witch Trials hysteria in order to manipulate the law into carrying out her murders. With the revelation that Rex has disappeared, and that Abigail is going to use the gallows that killed her to take her final victim, Ronan rushes to the Museum to confront her.
The last Museum sequence is actually pretty great, or at least as great as can be within the framework of the game’s mechanics. Here is the final puzzle, where Ronan has to casually jog around a few puddles of Lost Souls while a timer counts down in an unthreatening way, but with the question of just how to interact with the world and stop Abigail from pulling the lever and sentencing Joy to death. I actually love the solution, even though its not remotely difficult: Ronan Possesses and then Influences Joy, and in a callback that feels really good after seeing Joy and then Iris use it on Ronan, you select the “Powerful Scream” clue, Influencing Joy to use her medium abilities to throw Abigail out of Rex’s body.
Ronan and Abigail then tussle as Ronan tries to make her relive her execution, much in the way that touching Sophia’s arm allowed her to relive her murder so that Ronan could see. In the struggle, Abigail then turns it around on Ronan, and shows him the truth: Not only did Rex murder him while he was Possessed by Abigail, both Baxter and Ronan were also her pawns, having been Possessed to kill Rose and Sophia, and likely many others. This revelation recontextualizes a lot of the game, with Ronan in a sense looking for a serial killer when really the killer was in the mirror the whole time. Its a cliche plot, but it almost works here.
Ronan being the killer reframes the encounter with Sophia. He was the one that murdered her. Does she know it, when she flees from him? When she implores Ronan to watch her be murdered by a hooded, masked man, does she know that the killer was Ronan? The scene with Sophia is probably one of the best in the game just from how good her animations are, and the way that even without speaking she conveys so much, especially considering the graphics are not all that great. That scene really helps sell the ending, though it still feels like its coming out of left field and that there wasn’t much beyond that to foreshadow it.
Abigail’s revelation as being the killer on the other hand, feels far too telegraphed. When you first meet her, she has creepy ghost girl vibes that just strongly imply she’s up to no good, and later you meet her in the Apartments where she’s drawing mysterious runes that she hides throughout the game. No points for guessing that this is yet another collectible. She claims that these aren’t for Ronan, but unless they’re for herself and she just leaves them all over town for no reason, its never said who or what they are for.
Later on, she’s even seen by the player but not the characters as she watches on from a rooftop and hurries off suspiciously. At this point neither Ronan nor the player actually know her name, but when Ronan examines the gallows at the Museum, a scene plays of her execution, and the Clue mentions her name as being Abigail, which is what he identifies her as later on. It was so obvious that she was up to no good that it feels like the game doesn’t really earn it when she’s revealed to be up to no good. They didn’t put in any effort.
But, even if the two halves of the twist are poorly done in opposite ways, Abigail is still using the officers of the law to enact her punishment on the “witches” of Salem, killing any mediums that she can. She’s been doing this for a long, long time, too, with a display in the Museum restoration room showing off some of her victims over the years and mentioning Salem’s history with psychic police consultants who also mysteriously get murdered. One newspaper in the killer’s hideout even talks about a judge who committed murder but claims that evil spirits made him do it. One little bit of dropped hint, though I don’t think its enough for me.
It could almost be seen as a metaphor for the way that the police are violent murderers who get away with crimes, which of course makes them the best people to Possess if you’re a ghost who does murders. But I doubt that’s an intentional reading. Ronan’s ending narration is that there are no more killings now, and Joy will probably help Rex cover up his crimes so that he gets off scot free. And none of the victim’s families ever get closure. I mean, obviously they can’t just say “a ghost killed your loved ones”, supernatural murders always get covered up or just dropped. Here its a police officer — three police officers — and the one of them that lives just dusts off his hands and goes “well, that’s all over”. I doubt that its intentional. But it is still kind of glaring.
The ending narration talks about keeping dark sides hidden, and how “even the coldest cops” would forgive the minor crimes that Joy committed to find her mother, and how she’s a better kid than Ronan was. It feels like its trying to draw a parallel between them, but the problem is that even with Joy as almost a deuteragonist, she doesn’t get enough characterization. She doesn’t feel like she has an arc, aside from maybe accepting Ronan’s help more. But the moment she goes “oh, jeez, sorry about your wife, guy” she’s also running off back to the Church and getting captured by the cops. It doesn’t feel like she grows or learns a lesson. And, again, Ronan’s turn from a life of violent crime was ultimately just switching to doing violence to people that is societally appropriate because he has the backing of a badge and state authority.
But death repays debts, I guess. The only debt Ronan ultimately settles is that he knows he was the pawn of a murderer, and he stopped Joy from being murdered. Except she was only even in danger of being murdered because he put her in harm’s way. Abigail didn’t even know about Joy at first, and was after her mother, who Baxter had sent to a safe-house. Its a bit hollow of an end otherwise decent enough if unpolished finale to a decent enough if unpolished game. You don’t even really fight or have to contend with Abigail in any way, you just press X to finish the game and then a cutscene happens and you learn the shocking twist and then Ronan is almost dragged to Hell but he… just pulls Abigail into the Lost Souls instead and she dies. Again, I mean, since ghosts can do that here. And then you get this voice over about dark sides and being a good kid. It doesn’t feel earned, or even related to much else in the game.
Oh, right. And then Ronan gets to go to Heaven, or wherever the ghosts in this setting go. The last shot is Ronan hearing Joy call out to him from off screen and smiling.
The story of the game isn’t bad, but it really did need a redraft. Much of the game feels a bit like filler, even aside from all of the running around in empty or nearly empty locations and the extremely too large hub area. The twists don’t work as well as they could because they’re not set up well, and while the mechanics of solving an investigation are good on paper, many of the actual clues and the questions being asked can feel tacked on and unnecessary, like going all the way to the Church and having Ronan ask “why am I here?”. Picking the Church clue that led you to the Church is the obvious answer, which just completes the vision that Ronan was already experiencing.
There are many questions like that. There’s even an entire section where Ronan, a native of Salem, needs to go to the Museum to learn about the witch trials, and to finally — after already experiencing a death by dunking, one failed death by burning at the stake, one completed burning at the stake, and the Bell Killer looking for Joy and/or Cassandra — realize that the Bell Killer is targeting mediums and killing them in the same fashion as the witch trials executions.
One has to wonder just how the police never put this together, since that’s the thing the victims all had in common, and a display board in the museum mentions the police’s use of mediums as well as the way that mediums routinely end up murdered in Salem. If these women were all contacts for the police, why did the police not realize that connection they had in common? Even just from investigating into their lives, how did the police not realize that? At least when Ronan needs to go to the museum, sparked by realizing that he’s seen a witch burning stake in a museum flyer, he comes off as a doofus. Ronan is practically a himbo, albeit a pushy one. He’s at least somewhat likeable, especially with all his mannerisms, and his silly outfit.
Its not all on Ronan, though. Once again, Abigail’s set up as the true villain comes almost out of nowhere. She shows up just enough to get the player to go “oh, I bet she’s important”, but then doesn’t become important. There’s no indication she’s a murderer until the reveal, and when Ronan gets a flash of her death, she’s the one being executed for being a scourge on Salem. What’s more, while she’s acting as the Bell Killer, she demands that each girl denounce their contract with demons. Then when she’s revealed she’s the killer, she’s also got the ability to summon demons!
She at least summons Lost Souls to make it so you have to curve your path slightly during the dramatic moment where you have to get to Joy in time. Its not uncommon for villains to be hypocritical, and especially in supernatural fiction for them to use supernatural abilities to kill other people with supernatural abilities. But she knows what Demons are like. They aren’t intelligent, she even warns Ronan about their atavistic nature. She’s had about three hundred years and change to realize that Demons don’t make contracts. It would be like telling someone to renounce their contract with wolves, or bears. They don’t make contracts. They’re dumb animals.
Its also weird that she wants them to renounce their contract with demons, as opposed to something more specific, like Satan, or Lucifer, or “The Devil”. I can only assume that this slight deviation from the standard witch narrative, along with the more anime inspired look of the Demons is possibly due to the Japanese Square-Enix people involved in the creation of the game. The teams talked about having incidents where they didn’t realize that the other culture’s assumptions about ghosts were so different from their own. This might also explain why Ronan is so ignorant about his hometown’s very famous history to the point that it takes him so long to put it together. Soul Suspect was intended to appeal to westerners, but it still released in Japan, so it needed to be accessible to a Japanese audience that wouldn’t be quite so familiar with Salem and its history of witchcraft.
Of course, its not like the American team seems to have done much research, either. There are small nods to the actual history of witch trials, like the use of the name Abigail Williams and Johnathan Hathorne, but so much more is changed or left out entirely.
The “witches” themselves are shown to have been women who were able to communicate with ghosts. This isn’t horrible or anything, and is at least better than beloved 90s classic Hocus Pocus — which gives the implication that the women murdered as witches really were both witches and evil, making the practice of executions justified within that narrative — but its mixed with Abigail’s father torturing her to accuse his personal enemies as witches. Since the game never really goes into Abigail’s motivations, it confusingly leaves the impression that her father’s enemies were other young women.
It is true that in the historical witch trials feuds and pettiness and politics spilled over into fanning the flames of mass hysteria and possible ergot poisoning. John and Elizabeth Proctor would be the most famous example of this due to Arthur Miller’s play and movie The Crucible, where an aged up Abigail Miller wants to have an affair with an aged down John Proctor. But within this setting, the only man called a witch is an unnamed Puritan who shows up in a spectral vision getting crushed by heavy rocks. I’d argue that it was probably a reference to Giles Corey, the only person in America to suffer the fate of being pressed to death. Except that Giles was 81 at the time instead of vaguely 30, and they leave out the impressively bold “more weight” line.
In the game, Judge John Hathorne is said to have locked witches in his basement to be tortured before their executions, and that’s where you learn of Abigail’s place in the narrative, but when you see the vision of her, she’s maliciously gleeful and seems more than willing to have accused several women herself. There’s not any indication she’s been lying about them either, she just really hates mediums, so its not really certain just who her father was making her accuse or why.
Of course, John Hathorne fearing what havoc she could cause if she was ever allowed free is a pretty strange choice, since the real life Judge Hathorne was so known for feeling zero guilt that Nathaniel Hawthorne added the w to his name to distance himself from his ancestor. Here, Hathorne, who has like ten lines tops, seems both horrified of all the women who were murdered, but also seems to blame Abigail entirely, as if he wasn’t the one to sentence them all to death. True to his reputation, here in the game John “The Hanging Judge” Hathorne sentences Abigail to the gallows as well.
There’s so much of the actual history of the setting they chose that just goes completely unused. For instance, did you know that the first woman accused of starting all of this, and teaching Sarahs Good and Osbourne the lure of Satan, was a slave named Tituba? She was an indigenous woman from somewhere in South America or the Caribbean, taken as a slave by Samuel Parris when he was in Barbados. She confessed to knowing of things like ways to ward off evil and other spiritual practices like making “witch cake”, which is rye bread and piss that you feed to a dog to see if you’re being bewitched. Later she confessed to full on witchcraft and accused the Sarahs of the same. Of course, she also confessed to having been beaten by Parris and told what to say, which probably explains why all the witchcraft she claimed to have performed and all the demons that were said to be conjured were all culturally European instead of Carib or Vodoun.
If any of this is incorrect, its probably because I’m piecing together the history of the witch trials based on looking at a handful of Wikipedia articles, which still seems to have been more than Airtight Studios did.
Tituba’s absence from the game isn’t really surprising. The witch trials as an actual event are barely relevant, but more than that, the game completely ignores the existence of any Native or Black people. They seemingly don’t exist in this version of Salem. I seriously can’t remember seeing a Black person in the entire town, and despite telling me about workers from Salem that went to build the Panama canal and caught yellow fever or Spanish Flu or something and other meaningless historical trivia, the game never mentions the history of indigenous settlements all throughout the area of Massachusetts. I’m sure most people won’t think of it, but once I started to it was really noticeable that this version of Salem, though filled with remnants of fires and shipwrecks and plagues and other historical tragedies, never mentions the history of colonization and slavery.
Massachusetts had no slaves by 1790, but there was still a history of it all the same. They were the first place in New England to get slaves. It was a center of abolitionist movements. Black people existed in both Salem’s past and present, and there really should be some Naumkeag ghosts hanging around.
Speaking of ghosts hanging around, its time to talk about one of my favourite — but still disappointingly underused — parts of the game.
Cold Cases
Throughout the hub are a handful of perturbed ghosts who are more than willing to lay their burdens on Ronan, telling him about their fears and insecurities, the things that keep them trapped here in the Dusk. Ronan, being a helpful guy, will try to solve these mysteries.
I love ghost story mysteries. I love stories where the dead are laid to rest by caring detectives who can interact with them and solve their troubles. One of the only roleplaying games I’ve been able to successfully run and get a story out of was Geist: the Sin-eaters first edition. I wanted to capture that feel of early Bleach, where its just highschoolers dealing with ghost problems, and the player characters, freshly dead, decided to look into rumours that their school was haunted. They uncovered a twisty story of jealousy when a nerdy AV kid was murdered because the popular girl was into him, and eventually learning that their teacher had killed her crush when she was a student. The ghost’s killer was revealed, and confronted, and absolution was reached.
Probably. I mean, this was ten years ago, I don’t actually remember the specifics.
I keep coming back to an idea I have for stories focused on a necromancer detective, who gets caught up in helping ghosts and solving supernatural crimes. I really like the idea of ghost detectives.
Which is why its so disappointing that Soul Suspect doesn’t really lean into this much. The side cases are such a good part of the game, but there are only like four of them and they don’t really happen beyond the first few chapters of the game. Its like they had this good idea but were pressed for time. Or maybe they didn’t want the hub to be so empty of anything meaningful, so they put a few in at the last minute.
The cases themselves aren’t anything to write home about individually. A woman who was murdered in an apartment and stuffed into the boiler. A woman at the beach who died trying to save the victims of a shipwreck. A guy next to his crashed car who worries he killed his friends (who apparently didn’t leave behind ghosts to answer that question). A woman who thinks her boyfriend killed her to marry someone else.
None of them are good. They all involve wandering around small locations to search for clues. The woman who drowned needs you to do nothing more than wander the beach and Reveal the objects, then solve the mystery. They don’t get much more complicated, though the drunk guy at least requires you to go to a separate location to do more investigating.
Like with everything else about investigations, this could have been so much better, and thinking about what it could have been just makes me so disappointed. There could have been more of these. They would have been more interesting than a dozen collectibles in each level. They could have been spread out more, so that the clues don’t just exist within twenty feet of the ghosts. It would have been nice if they were treated like actual quests that you could investigate throughout the game, finding clues all over town instead of simply Revealing a newspaper and a framed photograph right next to the ghost that wonders how she died. It just makes the ghost feel incompetent. Sure, she’s been here since the ’20s, and her mind is probably going, but this wasn’t a difficult mystery. The echoes of her death are practically sitting out in the open, not even half-buried in sand.
I would have loved more. The Cemetery was packed with ghosts, many of whom even seemed to have problems you could have solved, but even the ones you can “Interrogate”, and I use that term loosely, just don’t. Overall, the ghosts in the game are far more interesting than the human characters who all mill about with the same dozen or so generic character models, and it would have been nice to see more from them, and experience more than just Ronan’s problems.
It also would have been nice to see more ghosts with grisly visages. You’ve got Ronan with his seven glowing red bullet holes, and then you’ve got Baxter with a missing eye and that’s it. Baxter’s bullet hole isn’t even glowing. In the end, it just became one more feature that had so much potential.
Autopsy
Murdered: Soul Suspect is not a good game. I’m not going to mince words and say otherwise. But its a game with so many good ideas that it doesn’t develop on, and so many mechanics because they just threw things at the wall to see what stuck. Its a game that is enjoyable, even if writing this has made me hate it a bit more than I did when I first sat down to replay it.
Its a game that I want to be good because it deals with themes and stories that I really like, but unfortunately it doesn’t do them justice.
Ronan and Joy are good characters, and I love the way they play off of each other, but to borrow a phrase, they deserved better than this game. Everything in Murdered deserved better than to be in this game that feels so dated I didn’t believe it was from 2014. It just looks so much older. It feels like a relic, but not in a good way. This was three years after LA Noire, and two years after The Walking Dead and it feels like it came before either of them.
I had said before that Vampyr reminded me of Soul Suspect, but I think I was misremembering due to the nostalgia I had for it. It reminds me more of another vampire game that I want to get around to analysing. 2013’s DARK, an unashamed rip off of White Wolf’s Vampires the Masquerade and Requiem where Geralt of Rivia is a former secret black ops soldier turned vampire. They don’t really have much in common, aside from the incredibly slow walking pace of the main character and clunky stealth focus, but they’re both solidly B tier games, or at least rather enjoyable C games.
I like Soul Suspect. I don’t know why, but I do. I just wish that it did better.
What I really wish for is that something else would come along and explore the many ideas that this game fumbled. Imagine an immersive sim where you play as a ghost detective. Or a game that focused more on the puzzles and traversal. Or a game where the detective work wasn’t confined to small sections, and where you could interview ghosts, maybe as witnesses to crimes.
I think what really makes it still such an interesting game is the aesthetic that it has. Nothing in the game particularly looks good individually. Maybe Joy and Ronan’s character designs are the best, and that’s only because unlike the other characters, they actually have character designs, between Ronan’s Gaia Online avatar outfit and Joy dressing like the punk runaway that she is, and wearing an uncommented on string of antique keys as a necklace. The world itself is too dark, and all the ghostly stuff is the same washed out grey that simultaneously looks really cool, but also gets old fast.
Even with the individual problems, though, the game has style. I love the way that clues pop up with little handwritten descriptions of what they are. I love that the prompt of the investigation hangs in the air in the same way, even in cutscenes.
The game may not have very good character designs, with Ronan and Joy getting interesting designs, the side characters being mundane but unique, and then everyone else looking like generic models, but there are so many little animation quirks that give things so much life.
After the phenomenal intro, Ronan comes back to his body to see the police are there now. Baxter, who always hated Ronan, has taken his silly little fedora off the body and is wearing it, mocking the dead just so the audience knows early on that he’s a piece of shit. When he turns around, Rex is there, and he just socks Baxter across the face. Then he picks up Ronan’s hat and dusts it off and puts it down on his chest and touches the hat and bows his head, promising he’s gonna catch the killer (who, by the way, is him). Its such a good bit of animation. It makes you feel for the pig, and conveys just how much he cares about Ronan so much that I don’t even remember what was actually said in the scene.
Later on, when Ronan goes to see Julia’s grave, Rex has come from the police station, where you saw him earlier with flowers, arguing with another cop to find Joy. He places the flowers down and talks to his sister, telling her that he’s sorry, and Ronan just watches over him, saying a solemn “she knows already”. Its so good.
Also throughout the entire Goddamned game Ronan is smoking a cigarette. If he’s not actively smoking it, he’s waving it around in cutscenes. Early on he flicks the ghost cigarette at Baxter, but in the next scene its somehow back in his hand so that he can wave it about. Its a ridiculous character tic and I love it so much. Someone please tell Square-Enix to remake this game. I wish it were better and that it were popular.
Thank you for reading, if indeed you still are. I’m not sure how to feel about this one. I thought I liked this game, but after writing this I’m not sure if I do anymore. I’ll probably give it a third pass when I get around to making this a video essay and potentially revisit my thoughts, but for now I’m pushing through and publishing this. I hope it at least was an interesting read, even if I didn’t convince you this game is worth your time.
If you did get this far, though, give me a clap or two, share this article around, and give me all the proper forms of engagement. Every time you engage with my work, the serotonin goes beep.
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Next time, I’ll finally get around to writing about Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines.
Nah, not really. I’m probably going to write something shorter, and then I’ll talk about Remedy’s Control once I play through the AWE expansion, and maybe Alan Wake.
