Metareview: Murdered: Soul Suspect

Murdered: Soul Suspect is proof of the old adage, "you can't keep a good cop down, even when you put roughly half a dozen slugs in his chest, because that dude will turn into a ghost that smokes ghost cigarettes." We ... may have embellished that a little bit.

While flawed in execution, our review found the game to be enjoyable nonetheless, with a compelling yarn to pull players along and an interesting fiction built into the town of Salem. There's more eyewitnesses ready to testify about this phantasmal tale, however, so let's see what they have to say.

• GamesBeat (89/100): "Murdered: Soul Suspect is one of the most surprisingly good games I've played in a long time. It manages to sell its bizarre premise and builds a solid, moving story out of it, and the plot-propelling investigations add immensely to the detective feel."

• Polygon (70/100): "Murdered: Soul Suspect is awash in tropes, but somehow, that's part of the charm. It's a pulpy detective tale remixed as a classic ghost story, and it works as a sort of playable B-movie. It's linear and mechanically simple, but it flows well and keeps a fast pace, at least as long as I wasn't chasing down demons."

• Eurogamer (60/100): "It's a Good 6, that delightful strata of games that stumble in the technical aspects, but compensate with personality and charm, somehow all the more enjoyable for their imperfections. I can't pretend that Soul Suspect is a particularly great game, but I do know that it's the sort of game I'll still remember - and remember fondly - in five years' time, which is more than can be said for most of its glossier rivals."

• IGN (55/100): "There are some great concepts in Murdered: Soul Suspect, but they feel undercooked or underutilised, and the lack of demand for any real input from us makes Murdered feel like a pick-a-path game where there's only one path. It scrapes by on the power of its central whodunnit mystery, but I can't help but feel that Murdered: Soul Suspect is ten hours worth of unfinished business."

• The Escapist (50/100): "At first glance, Murdered: Soul Suspect feels like it almost had it all - an engaging story, challenging puzzles, tough action and a good amount of side quests to round everything out. But that all quickly becomes as transparent as Salem's undead population when you realize Soul Suspect's attempts to stand apart are lackluster at best. It's not the worst adventure title out there, but it's really, really hard to recommend it to anyone."

[Image: Square Enix]