Murdered: Soul Suspect

Diamond in the rough

Murdered: Soul Suspect is a third person over-the shoulder action game that was very much under-rated, in my humble opinion. It has elements of supernatural survival horror and elements of an "investigative" Sherlock Holmes type game. Your character, a detective, is killed early on and you play the game as his ghost (complete with supernatural abilities that you pick up along the way), trying to piece together exactly what lead to your demise. As one would expect in this type of game, there are a LOT of collectibles to chase down. Fortunately most are easily seen and if you have any problems, there are numerous guides...both video and text, floating around the web. Also, while you can not 'chapter select' to pick up what you missed, collectibles DO carry over, so you can start a new playthrough and whatever you picked up in a previous playthrough will still be counted as found.

The graphics look really good and the controls are very intuitive. Most cutscenes are able to be skipped if you wish and even some dialogue (make your dialogue choice, click B to skip the conversation, make your next choice). It seems to be hit or miss though since I did run into some dialogue last night that couldn't be skipped.

There is only one aspect that requires stealth and it's not too bad, even for someone like myself who detests stealthy gameplay. There are demons that you must hide from, distract, then execute. Some of the demon sections may lead to your death and restart from last checkpoint but overall they aren't ridiculously hard. None of the game seems to be, actually. I'm only around 50% - 75% of the way through but so far it seems like it should end up being a fairly simple 1k. The guide writer on XboxAchievements.com rated it at a 3/10 as far as completion difficulty so as usual, I went in assuming it would be closer to 5/10 since they tend to under-estimate (or I just plain suck...not sure which) but I believe the 3/10 rating to be fairly accurate from what I've seen thus far.

This game was released on Xbox One and Xbox 360, so if you play it on one platform and enjoy it, you can easily net yourself another 1k by renting/buying it on the other platform as well. Personally, I consider this game a diamond in the rough and am very surprised that it didn't garner more buzz when it released. Overall I'd give it a solid 7.5/10.