Murdered: Soul Suspect wants you to use your brain, not your trigger finger

These laws make it difficult for him to do any of the things detectives normally do.

These laws make it difficult for him to do any of the things detectives normally do. Instead of running up to a witness and screaming “Tell me where the guy went!” or dusting for fingerprints, he needs to influence things indirectly from The Dusk, a limbo between the lands of the living and the dead. This means inspecting the crime scene, possessing people and objects, and using his powers of deduction in lieu of having the power to pick things up.

Ronan does have some neat ethereal abilities, though. He can jump into the bodies of living people to hear their thoughts, looking out of their eyes to see what they're looking at or listening out of their ears to hear details that might help him solve the mystery. After he's gathered up all of the clues he can carry, Ronan needs to piece things together, moving the case forward by way of brain, not brawn. It's rare a game challenges the player's deduction instead of just focusing on aim, and it's great to see Airtight Games gun for a smarter target.

There's still some action, though—Demons exist within the Dusk, and at one point Ronan has to destroy a bunch of these otherworldly monsters by hiding inside of objects and waiting for the perfect time to leap into the beings to obliterate them from within. These segments seem short compared to those requiring investigation, though, and more often than not Ronan is walking through walls, shorting out electronics (with his limited power over the real world), and trying to find out what the hell killed him.

The ghostly detective eventually discovers that the evil creature that killed the crap out of him was looking for a girl hiding in an apartment building, and that the woman slipped away during the chaos of the fight. His next objective is to try and chase her down, pushing the officer forward in the adventure you'll be able to experience for yourself when the game launches in 2014.

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