Was Murdered: Soul Suspect a gem or a dud?

Hey, I heard Danielle Riendeau mention couple weeks ago how underrated this game was, how much she liked it. I know her tastes a little bit and the kinds of games she might champion and highlight.

Did any of y'all play this game? What did you think? Also, it was John Carpenter's Top 5 game of that year.

Love it in a B movie way. It’s dumb as nails and kinda clunky (but never unbearably so). It seems self aware enough that you’re kinda laughing with it.

A friend of mine described it as a shitty haunted house that you go on for stupid, no investment enjoyment, and I think that’s pretty apt. With the right mindset it’s a super fun game, if you want production values, amazing gameplay, plot and characters, this is not it.

I played an hour or two. It seemed cool enough. I have no idea if it goes anywhere super interesting. I think the adventure and puzzle elements were cool. I played long enough to get some early combat, which didn’t feel like something the game really needed... it was early, still, but that’s what I thought at the time.

There are just too many good games out there to give them all their due.

It's a solid B/B- game. Think Evil Within on a budget, a knowingly cheesy plot, and a Crime Scene Investigation puzzle mechanic.

It was certainly better than people gave it credit for. I was surprised how well its detective mechanics worked.

Every time I see this thing for 3 bucks on PS4 I look into this exact question (and at this point that feels like twice a year or so). Always seems like something I'd enjoy, but my apprehension about the gameplay being too clunky and the story potentially not paying off always manage keep me away.

I played through it a few years ago. It's not a terrible game, but it's not great either. I'm not even sure I'd call it a B game, at least, not in the same way Singularity is a B game. There are a few scenes that stick out in my head, which is more than I can say about a lot of games, but I also remember it was very clunky and the combat sections were all pretty bad. If the concept sounds interesting to you, I'd check it out for $10 or so. It's hard to go wrong at that price.

I'll join the chorus of a pretty solid B game,

It's one of the most average, 3-star games I've ever played. Nothing super special about it, nothing glaringly terrible about it, perfectly competent but quite forgettable.

It was decent, i think B game is the best way to describe it. Didn't hate it, didnt' love it but i finished it.

@theht: If you have some interest in it or even just curiosity, I'd say $3 is worth even just satisfying that curiosity. At the very least, it's definitely interesting.

I just finished it after thinking about playing it for five years.

It was okay. I really enjoyed it, but it was just okay.

It's really interesting to have a game that has almost no combat emphasis whatsoever. There are maybe five or six "combat encounters," but they're all over in about 45 seconds and never present anything that could be considered a challenge. The bulk of the gameplay is just walking around and looking at stuff and exploring the environment. Another mechanic I thought was interesting was the ability to walk through anything that isn't ghostly, meaning almost all of the levels in the game were basically a flat floor plan. It was really hard to deal with at first and made navigating spaces super confusing, but once you adjusted your mind to deal with that, you could move about pretty efficiently.

Another thing I really liked were the ghost stories. Each area of the game had a series of collectibles that you could gather to unlock a ghost story, which was pretty much a campfire spooky story in the vein of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, accompanied by a drawing. They were pretty well done and featured easily the best voice acting in the game. The one one that you find in the apartments and that one in the mental asylum were my favourites (although Yuri Lowenthal's was terrible. He's just... not a good VA. Sorry. Not even as Spider-man).

Speaking of mental asylum, the game does make some missteps. The entire trek through the asylum is like a gathering of the worst tropes about mental illness packed into a half hour of gameplay, culminating in a conversation with someone they describe as paranoid schizophrenic. She's locked in a cell, drawing on the walls in crayon, and screaming unintelligibly. ...yeah. There's also some clumsy side stories about drunk driving and suicide and infanticide (ft. the lowest-poly dead baby I've ever had the displeasure of seeing), but by and large the story and side content range from "alright" to "surprisingly good." Big shout out to Jason Brooks for giving Ronan a pretty likeable personality.

This game's biggest enemy was its budget, though. The animations can be weird and janky, the interface occasionally unresponsive, and I had more than a few bugs that required me to reload checkpoints. There are characters who will say one line as one VA, and then have their inner monologue voiced by someone completely different. The combat itself reeks of something that was put in the game against the wishes of anyone involved, and it exists only to be a bullet point on the back of the box; I can't help but feel that they should have spent less time on typical gameplay - i.e. combat and collectibles and navigating the world - and put their time into tightening up the story and core presentation.

Overall, despite its budget feel and messy handling, it was a fun ride. The story is easy to predict but plays out in an enjoyable way (though writing this, I'm realizing that a lot of it is made up of fridge logic), and putting detective work and clue gathering at the forefront of the game makes it more engaging than it would have been if told traditionally. The detective mechanics are vague and occasionally obtuse but more often than not, they make you actually think about intent and context and encourage you to actively participate with the story unfolding. In a lot of ways, Return of the Obra Dinn is this game without any of the fat. A razor-focused, laser-sharp detective game that forces you to really understand the characters involved. As it stands now, Soul Suspect is a bumpy-but-fun adventure game ride buoyed by nonstandard mechanics and carried largely by Jason Brooks' solid portrayal of the main character. If that sounds like fun to anyone, I do recommend it.

I remember the Best Friends LP of it, so I'd describe it as having cult status potential.

I didn't like it at all. Couldn't get into it 'cause it felt so linear. Only played like 2-3h of it so perhaps I would have liked it more if I stuck with it. But the damn backlog is alarmingly long.

To me it can be summed up as "that game that isn't Ghost Trick".

It was the first game I played when I got my xbox one, there weren't a ton of other games to choose from at the time. It was like 15 bucks and I had a great time with it, I like ghosts and ghost stories and its one of the few games that deals with those. There's a certain amount of buy in you need, and the gameplay itself isn't the interesting part. But I enjoyed its quirkiness more than some other "big" releases of the past few years.

I never felt the need to finish it, but what I played was really interesting and enjoyable despite some jank.