Murdered: Soul Suspect

I've seen some people complain about its short gamelength, but I don't share this criticism. On the contrary, even though I enjoyed parts of it, I'm kind of glad it's over now. In my opinion there isn't enough interesting gameplay to even fill these 6-10 hours with. The saddest thing about this game is that it had potential and mostly just squandered it. It could have been great, but ended up rather average and flawed.

So let me start by listing what I liked about it. It has a gripping setting and premise, and it's full of great ideas: in theory your ghost detective can freely explore his surroundings by walking through walls, possessing cats, teleporting himself across gaps, reading and influencing people's mind, playing poltergeist etc. And the game is very cinematic, has a small but great atmospheric soundtrack and good sound design, I like the style, the graphics and color choice, and I found the animations and voiceovers for the main characters nice enough. The plot is not groundbreaking, but quite alright, interesting enough for me to complete the game. I especially appreciated the human touch in the storytelling, the realistic love story in the background, the empathy with the deceased, the sad ghost stories that manage to be creepy without resorting to cheap sensationalism. In general I find it praiseworthy that they pulled it off to give the game a creepy atmosphere even without having to use jump scares, death threats towards the player and explicitly shown cruelty.

Which brings me to the completely unnecessary introduction of those badly implemented pseudo action and stealth sequences with 'scary' demons that distract you from your adventure game investigation and exploration by threatening to reset you to your last checkpoint if you don't manage to beat them all in a row. Beating them consists of getting behind them without being seen by any of them, and then playing a little Simon-Says-QTE with them. And you had better be good at that game, because if not they will discover and hunt you, and your chances of escaping them are slim.

And that is also due to another flaw in the game design: The hotspots for objects you can interact with (such as hiding places from the demons) are rather small for a game played with a gamepad, especially considering that you don't have a cursor or crosshair or whatever on screen to indicate what you're currently targeting. That way searching for collectables and evidence can become a tedious pixel hunt despite the visual clues you get sometimes (and other times not; the close camera in small rooms doesn't help much with the pixel hunting either). But even worse is that it requires great precision and nerves in the 'action' sequences - the finicky controls and small hotspots can really ruin your attempts at sneaking and hiding, especially when it gets hectic. I tried to deal with this issue by using mouse and keyboard, at least for the 'action' sequences, and it was a slight improvement - until it came to the QTEs and I was asked to quickly press Q, E, R or T in addition to a random mouse button, with no option to reconfigure the controls. For the second half of the game, when it got worse and worse, I just found myself a cheat for avoiding this action/stealth/QTE nonsense, so that I could at least try and complete the adventure game without further distraction and hindrances and without having a fit.

Now, when I said there isn't enough interesting gameplay in Murdered, let me clarify that I also enjoy adventure games with even less interaction than this title has to offer. I don't mind playing 'walking simulators', visual or interactive novels or casual games, I also like hunting for collectables when it's done right. So in the beginning I was ready to adapt to the casual gameplay and overlook that Murdered artificially fences off the small areas it allows you to explore freely (rendering your awesome ghost abilities almost useless except for those cases where they are the only solution to a problem), and also that the puzzles were either just related to pixel hunting or presented in a way that seemed more suited for kindergartners than adults ("match this clattering sound with a relevant item: a random fork, a random spoon, or that important key you were looking for all the time"). But it quickly gets repetitive, doing the same casual things over and over again in each new area. Even the silly demon jump scares got pretty predictable.

And while it's cool to read the minds of most NPCs, most of them repeat themselves after the first two comments, but since a few of them also have three comments or just one, you will only know that you've heard it all now, when they start repeating themselves (which you can't abort then, so you have to listen to it again). And if you read their mind while they're engaged in a conversation, the conflicting voiceovers will overlap or replace each other, so that you'll miss half of them. But then again, most of the NPCs don't have any interesting thoughts anyway. Some even share the same lines, the same faces, the same voices. I also ran into a glitch once where I had to possess an invisible NPC and solve a puzzle for her without knowing who she is and why she is (not) there - the model was only displayed correctly after I solved it.

TL:DR
It's not a truly bad game, all production values considered, and it was nice enough to play through for the story and cinematics, with the help of my anti-demon cheat. It also features many great ideas, but unfortunately their execution is mostly average at best and frustrating at worst. So it's just not that good either, and that's a shame because it could have been so much better with just a little more effort. All in all, despite its attractive appearance, I wouldn't really recommend it to anyone unless they are mostly in it for the storytelling and cinematics and are patient enough to endure the casual, restricted and somewhat tedious and repetitive gameplay.