Murdered: Soul Suspect

A long long time ago on the DS there was a game called Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective.  It was a puzzle game about a guy who had been killed but remained in the real world as a ghost and the player had to solve his own murder.  Murdered: Soul Suspect, despite its silly name has a similar premise and that got me excited and while I personally enjoyed the game, I feel that it was lacking.

The story follows a detective called Ronan who in his younger years was a bit of a criminal.  Thanks to some forging of paperwork from his brother he managed to get a job with the police and put his life back on track.  Ronan is working the case of a serial killer in the city of Salem (yeah, I know) and at the very start of the game he is thrown out of a 3 story window and then shot to death by the killer himself.  Ronan however lingers in the real world as a ghost which pisses him off because he was hoping to join his dead wife but he can't do that until he resolves his business with the serial killer he's been after for so long.

Gameplay in Murdered: Soul Suspect has you exploring environments, looking for clues and picking up other collectable crap that fleshes out the back story as well as Ronan's character.  Every area is about the same.  You watch a cutscene, find a bunch of clues, watch another cutscene and then progress to the next area.  Between areas there are a few side quests to do but they feel a bit pointless and don't really reward you with anything.  As you look for clues there's some kind of badge ranking system but as far as I'm aware it doesn't actually have any bearing on anything.  I've not looked it up but I'm pretty sure there aren't a multitude of endings you can get by playing the game in certain ways.

The one part of this game that pissed me off was the demons.  Demons are these sausage looking things that spawn usually when you're trying to escape an area or progress to some key plot element.  The idea is that if they see you they will chase you and suck your soul until you die.  You can hide inside these spirit things if you get caught and escaping the demons is not hard at all.  If you can sneak up behind them you can execute them and most of the demons are so easy to execute that they serve as nothing more than a minor annoyance rather than anything else.  I guess they were put in to build tension but the effect falls flat.

There are many aspects to this game like the demons and the aforementioned badge system that makes the game feel like a lot of shit was cut.  Like they had plans to do some much more with various parts of the designed but had to drop it for time constraints or whatever.

That said, I did enjoy Soul Suspect but I'd find it hard to recommend to another person.  It's story, while predictable and a bit silly kept me interested enough for me to play it through to the end and I did like Ronan as a character.  There are a number of little niggles regarding the plot and the mechanics of the ghost world but that's just a case of me reading way too much into things.  If you can grab it on a sale, I'd say go for it, it's not that long and it'll kill a few lazy afternoons.  It doesn't quite stack up to Ghost Trick but good enough for now.