Murdered: Soul Suspect: What the critics say

One word explains Square Enix's latest feature on consoles everywhere: Mediocre.

Currently, Murdered: Soul Suspect received a 59 on Metacritic for the PlayStation 4 version, and that holds about true with other reviews on all the other platforms: PC, Xbox One, Xbox 360, and PS3.

In summary: Nearly everybody agrees that it's a pretty average murder-mystery game, a great idea for a game that just wasn't executed as properly as it could have been. The storyline lacks any real punch or substance, and so do the characters. This loses the gamer and essentially becomes boring and mundane.

The collectibles in the game become a chore and there's some strange emissions in the game, including not having a radar screen or aim by looking controls.

People applauded that this wasn't a standard run-of-the-mill game from a big publisher, but it was left a little undercooked. The game looks great however, doesn't seem to have any mechanical problems, and varying opinions on the actual storyline range from boring to memorable for years to come.

Quotes: We'll take snippets from three different reviews. The highest rated review on Metacritic is from Evan Killham at GamesBeat (part of VentureBeat) giving it 89/100. Chris Holzworth of EGM was one of the many that gave it a mediocre score (5.5/10), and Roger Hargreaves from Metro UK gave it the worst score (3/10).

Killham:

Murdered feels like what would happen if 2010′s cult classic Deadly Premonition were more interested in telling a detective story than being an over-the-top homage to Twin Peaks. Murdered takes a chance on handling its silly subject matter with a straight face, and it pays off with a story that is intriguing, suspenseful, and ultimately human.

Holzworth:

Honestly, what passes for interactivity here is best described as a three-dimensional adventure game, in which Ronan can freely roam crime scenes and the streets of a small slice of Salem and press Square to inspect this or that. Then, once he’s gathered enough evidence, he can make associations and come to an intuitive understanding of what’s gone down. But while it’s refreshing not to spend either side of every other plot beat mowing down otherworldly enemies or some such, an unnecessary amount of handholding during investigations robs Murdered: Soul Suspect of deductive intrigue

Hargreaves:

Developer Airtight Games, best known for the Portal-esque Quantum Conundrum, should’ve realised they don’t have the budget for photorealistic characters, and if only they’d gone for a more abstract art style the issue could’ve been avoided. But it’s not just the visuals that aren’t up to snuff, with the voice-acting being below par and the writing similarly unexceptional.
Soul Suspect has a very trite view of the afterlife and the dialogue and characters just aren’t interesting enough to justify such a plot-heavy game. And they need to be because at times Soul Suspect barely seems any more interactive than a Telltale game, with progress rewarded only by unexciting procedural work and careful observation of your surroundings.