It’s been a busy May with some top notch games being released but as we move forward into June don’t think the ride is over. On June 3rd Square drops its latest on both last and current gen systems. Murdered: Soul Suspect has had its ups and downs in the PR department but as we get closer to release it seems like the hype is building up again. In the game you take on the role of Ronan O’Connor, a detective in Salem who gets brutally killed during one of his investigations. Of course this isn’t the end but the beginning for Ronan as he heads up his own investigation into the murder as a ghost.
Unlike many games we’ve seen lately Murdered: SS doesn’t have a massive focus on combat and violence but more so on problem solving and critical thinking. To put it bluntly the CoD ‘kill it if it moves’ crowd might not rank this one high on their want list! Recently, in a video interview with Connected Digital World, Executive Producer Naoto Sugiyama explained that the team added many interactions into the game with the very specific purpose of making the “ghost experience” truly enjoyable:
“We get asked a lot the question about longevity. It varies so much that it’s so hard to tell the average number of hours, so it really depends on how you play this game. If you rush through, you’re definitely going to finish it sooner, but there’s so many things you can interact with in the world – that’s actually one of the strong, unique points of the title. Many narrative driven games in the mystery solving genre don’t let the player interact a lot with the game world, but we wanted people to enjoy being a ghost and doing ghostly things. We have a lot of things that, if you do those interactions, it’s going to take a lot of time; we encourage to do it as much as possible, because it is going to make your experience richer.”
Regardless, being a ghost isn’t without its own set of dangers as Ronan can encounter some particularly nasty demons in his travels. They’ll hunt him down and if he’s unfortunate enough to have to face one he’ll be in for one hell of a battle.
“We definitely wanted to have a threat. We didn’t want to have a ghost taking his sweet time and relaxing; we wanted that place to be dangerous, to create tension. Combat is sort of stealthish, since these guys are so overwhelming; once you’re found, it’s so hard to get away. You’ll have to make sure to understand the behavioural patterns and then make a strategy to take them down or just walk away.”
