Murdered: Soul Suspect

Murdered: Soul Suspect could have been a really fun detective experience, but it's actually an average point and click mystery game with higher production values.

Murdered: Soul Suspect is like a diamond in the rough: a dead detective, with supernatural powers, who has to solve his own assassination is an attractive plot. Having said that, Airtight Games didn't know how tap into those features to deliver what could have been an excellent game about finding clues and solving crime scenes. At least the game delivers a somewhat interesting story with an unpredictable ending.

Murdered: Soul Suspect lingers almost exactly at the quality middle point as a game. It doesn't do anything particularly good, nor does it do anything terribly bad; it's just okay.

By far and away the worst part of Murdered: Soul Suspect is the completely unnecessary quasi-combat that is littered throughout the game.

The concept and setting here were ripe for out-of-left-field explosiveness, but due to a lack of direction and capitalisation, and likely a small budget, all we’re left with is a lifeless game that fails to live up to its potential.

Throwaway macabre fun, Murdered: Soul Suspect will likely keep you hooked until its only partially predictable conclusion. The game does a decent job of throwing up red herrings, before delivering its ending, but the journey to get there is a largely uninspired and inconsistent slog.

Airtight Games’ supernatural gumshoe adventure manages to deliver an interesting enough tale, but most of the systems meant to make it engaging on an interactive level fall flat. As a game it just doesn’t work.

It scrapes by on the power of its central whodunnit mystery, but I can’t help but feel that Murdered: Soul Suspect is ten hours worth of unfinished business.

Frustrating and unrewarding crime solving surrounded by inconsistent gameplay systems. [Aug 2014, p.62]

Murdered: Soul Suspect is often interesting, with a clever story and cool characters. Other times it’s a messy affair, with pale graphics, boring gameplay and confusing mechanics.

It’s certainly rough around the edges but Murdered’s quirky charm and engaging story will have you playing till its too-quick conclusion.

I truly wanted to like this game. It combines several of my favorite tropes and ideas into one cohesive whole, and I respect what it was trying to attain. But combining a half-baked hide-and-seek operation with a ghost story that seems ripped straight from a casual game isn't the way to hold my attention.

Although the basic gameplay is serviceable, Murdered barely moves past standard point-and-click fare.

Much as it saddens us, given the promise of seeing a 3D Ghost Trick, we pronounce this dead on arrival.

A poorly structured and mechanically inert oddity that, for the most part, barely qualifies as a traditional videogame. There’s no challenge, no pith, no invention and ultimately no point.