When you die, they say your life flashes before your eyes. All of your regrets, all your triumphs. The people you love coming into your life, and being taken from it too soon. Stories etched into your memories like tattoos. A juvenile life of crime, cheating death after being stabbed in a brawl. Finding a woman you love, and choosing to turn over a new leaf. Becoming a member of law enforcement 🐷. The woman you love being taken from you, and a life without her looming before you. 

I actually love these first five minutes or so of the game. Its a really well done opening scene, even though its filled with so many cliches. The guy with the violent upbringing on the mean streets of [checks notes] Salem, Massachusetts finds love, becomes a cop to turn his life around, loses his love, becomes a renegade with a death wish. Ronan’s outfit is ridiculous, and I can only imagine someone would dress like that if that’s how they thought detectives are supposed to dress. The mysterious and possibly supernatural serial killer, going into the light, solving your own murder. Just because something is cliche doesn’t mean its bad, and I love the way Soul Suspect just throws as many cliches as they can into the pot.

There’s a bit of very controlled moments of interactivity in this intro, all of which is little more than moving the stick forward or pressing a button. I see what they were going for, and its obvious they were keeping the camera and movement restricted to keep the player from seeing Ronan’s corpse, but I feel like that reveal of “oh no, you’re dead!” already sort of loses its touch when you’re playing a game with a ghost on the title screen. If anything, what I dislike about it is that these sort of “close ups” don’t ever really happen elsewhere in the game, which is a shame because they really seem like they added a lot to LA Noire, and this game could have used that.

This intro may actually be one of my favourite game intros, period. Unfortunately, this kind of pace isn’t kept up through the rest of the game, and even with the ridiculous segments of moving Ronan’s hand to the door handle or trying to line his limbs up correctly, this is a narrative high point for the game.

No Rest For the Dead

Ronan dies, is told to solve his murder, gets a lecture on ghost powers and demons from a little puritan ghost, goes back to the crime scene, learns nothing meaningful, goes back to the apartment he was thrown out of, realizes that a girl named Joy was a witness to his murder, tracks her down to the church, and learns Joy, like her mother, is a medium. Joy’s mother, a medium who works with the police, has also been missing. Joy uses her ghost powers to force him back as she runs away, but Ronan tracks her down to the police station where she’s been caught and being interrogated about her mother’s disappearance. Ronan helps her steal her mother’s cryptic journal back.

The mental hospital is just as cliche as everything else in the game, and Ronan and Joy find that Iris is a raving lunatic, driven to draw on the walls in crayon. When Ronan tries to possess her to read her mind, he learns that she’s also a medium. And possessed by the ghost of her sister, Rose. They were both kidnapped by the Bell Killer together, but Rose sacrificed herself to help get Iris away and was burned at the stake, leaving her ghost charred and on fire.

There’s almost a confrontation with Rose, but that might have been interesting, so instead Ronan points out that as the stereotype demands, Iris is going to be lobotomized if they don’t all escape. Rose and Iris explain that the Bell Killer was demanding they admit to making a contract with demons. Ronan then has Joy, Iris, and Rose go back to the church. Ronan recognizes that he’s seen the stake Rose was burned at before, on a museum flyer for a Salem Witch Trials exhibit in Joy’s mother’s notebook. Ronan, a native of Salem, Massachusetts, then goes to the museum’s gala to learn about the thing the town of Salem is most famous for.

Joy meets up with him, Ronan chastises her for not staying with Iris. In addition to the history lesson, Ronan realizes that mediums were seen as witches, and that Salem has a history of mediums working with the police and also a history of mediums being murdered by serial killers. He also gets a vision of Baxter, a rival on the police force who hates him and the man who worked with Joy’s mother, hiding evidence in the museum. Ronan sends Joy back to the church and is all set to go snoop on Baxter when he sees police cars speeding back to the church.

Back at the church, the Bell Killer has killed Iris by crushing her with a big stone statue, similar to the way that people were crushed by rocks during the witch trials. He also killed the priest, as well as a small wedding party, and Ronan’s visions of the attack show that the killer had supernatural strength, capable of throwing people around and chasing Iris out the third story window when she jumped and broke her leg. The ghost of Iris and Rose then confront Ronan and tell him that he isn’t to blame and not to hold tight to what’s keeping him here, and then are removed from the plot by passing on.

Ronan leaves Joy in the custody of his brother in law, Rex, reasoning that she’ll be safer if the police arrest her, and follows up on a vision of a witch trials judge’s house that he got off of a key the Bell Killer conveniently dropped. There he finds a panda, and believes it to be Baxter. Inside the house that is filled with just so much empty space, Ronan finds the killer’s secret hideout filled with centuries old newspaper clippings, photos, trophies, and spooky children’s rhyme style poems written in red paint. In the basement he finds Baxter’s corpse and ghost, who gives Ronan more clues. The Bell Killer said he already knows death, and that the instrument of his death would kill again tonight. Ronan has Baxter go get Joy’s mother from the safe house he stashed her in, and Ronan goes deeper into the basement where he realizes that Abigail, the puritan girl from the beginning of the game is the Bell Killer and lied to get mediums executed before she was found out and hanged by the court herself.

Ronan overhears a cop on Baxter’s radio asking if Dispatch has seen Rex, and realizes that he must be possessed by Abigail and has now kidnapped Joy to murder her. The instrument of her death must be the gallows that Abigail was hanged from, and Ronan rushes to the museum once again for a final confrontation where Rex is revealed to be the Bell Killer. Ronan stops Abigail by possessing Joy and using her ghostly scream to throw Abigail out of Rex before he can pull the gallows lever. Ronan then grabs Abigail and forces her to relive her own death, but she then turns it around on Ronan and shows him his death and reveals the last pieces of the puzzle.

Rex was the Bell Killer, and threw Ronan out of the window.

But Baxter was also the Bell Killer, and burned Rose.

And Ronan was also the Bell Killer, and killed Sophia.

Then Abigail tries to use her demon controlling powers and Ronan basically just throws her into her own demon puddle and she gets pulled into, I don’t know, hell or something. The day is saved, the murderer is dealt with, Joy and Cassandra reunite, and Ronan finally gets to go to heaven or whatever. Also Joy will probably help Rex cover up the murders he did so none of those families will ever find closure but I guess that’s not important.

Your primary method of interacting with the world is by walking around and pressing the right trigger to activate your ghostly powers, whether its Possession to get inside the mind of a living human (literally), or Poltergeist to make electronics go on the fritz. Most of the world of the game takes place in overly large, empty settings, with very little to see or do besides using Possession to hear the meaningless and often repetitive thoughts of NPCs that barely even move from their place.

Ghost abilities are all contextual aside from the teleport, but considering that’s useless for anything besides getting to hard to reach places, it might as well be. The game is very empty, even in the too large and mazelike area that serves as a hub. There are a crap ton of meaningless knicknacks to pick up, ranging from the memories of Ronan’s wife, Julia, that fill in a lot of her personality and help flesh out just why Ronan is so in love with her. There are also artifacts that tell about the Bell Killer’s other victims, and historical facts about Salem or the Witch Trials. All of these feel like the kind of thing that a better game would use to give the world character or serve as interesting worldbuilding that tells the player something significant. That’s not the case in Soul Suspect. Even the longest Julia memories are little more than blurbs. Everything is just a short bit of text, often little more than a factoid. Its disappointing. Especially considering there are 255 of these scattered throughout the game. 91 of which are location specific bits and bobs that are hidden in each area. These at least give audio logs of people telling stories of their ghostly encounters.

Where the game really shines, and frankly the only parts you could really call a game, are the investigations. They’re far from perfect, and mostly consist of awkwardly walking around and hoping that you get a button prompt, continuing the tradition set by pixel hunting games of days gone by. Compared to what Telltale was doing at the same time to revolutionize the concept of an adventure game and bring them into the modern day, Soul Suspect feels out of place. It also doesn’t really measure up to LA Noire, which years earlier had similar investigative gameplay, but where Soul Suspect involves pressing X to look at something, LA Noire has the player picking things up and zooming in and turning ticket stubs over.

While the main verb for investigations is just Investigate, which results in Ronan bending down to examine an object, causing floating white letters to appear and giving a sentence long blurb about what it is, inconsistently the game changes it up. These segments are too short and inconsequential to be considered minigames, but they have the ludic feeling of a minigame with the way the controls change.

Many of these are activated by Possessing individual humans hanging around whatever investigation area there is. Normally this ability is borderline useless, and simply allows you to read the mind of whoever you’re possessing, which is fun and interesting at first, but you quickly learn that for every interesting mental conversation you overhear, there will be twenty other people with completely vapid thoughts. Maybe all of once, Possession will let you Eavesdrop, listening in on the gossip as the cop who hates Ronan badmouths him while the body is still cold. Used slightly more is Peer, which puts you right into the eyes of the person you’re voyeuristically mind reading, but each of the few times this happens, all it does is give you a one action minigame where you choose from one of three choices to collect as a clue.

The most interesting, but still underutilized, ability when possessing someone is to Influence them, which brings up the same menu as at the close of a case, where you’re presented with a spread of all the relevant clues in this investigation laid out in a random order in your little clue cloud and you’re asked which of them would make this person think of something specific.

There are also moments where instead of simply gaining the clue from pressing X when Ronan looks at it, you’ll be treated to something similar to Peek, only this time Ronan will be presented with a phantom sound and have to choose which word relates to it. There aren’t any subtitles for these sounds, so I can only assume these sections aren’t very friendly to people with hearing issues. Or at least, that would be the case if they weren’t all incredibly simple to the point of it being tedious. After seeing a vision of the Bell Killer dropping a key into a vent, then possessing a cat to travel through the vent, and finally falling out of the vent and knocking the thing in the vent onto the floor, which of the three items is making the metallic clattering sound? Is it the Fork? Or maybe the Spoon? Or could it be the big bulky key that has more detail than either of them combined?

One of the most frustrating little minigames occurs most often when you Reveal a ghostly echo — a sort of statue in the spiritual world — and examine that. These play out psychic visions and then stop halfway through to darken the screen and overlay a shifting word cloud where you pick out what emotion or action is being experienced in this scene. The game is nowhere near as graphically polished as LA Noire was, so characters don’t have that same level of facial animation, but it doesn’t matter, because all of the correct responses are overt. Is the woman running from the serial killer and barreling into a crowd of people Calm? Or is she Frightened? Choosing one of the correct answers will also eliminate a few incorrect answers, and its just… not fun. It feels insulting, in a way. This feels like something for children, but this is a game rated M. For mature. I know people running away from serial killers aren’t calm.

None of these mechanical quirks — aside from not being able to get attention as a cat — are necessarily bad, but none of them are finished. They feel half-baked, and there are many moments where the mechanics shift to something that’s never seen again. The moments at the very beginning of the game, where you actually guide Ronan’s hand to the door, or to touching the face of his body, and the way you have to align the limbs of his ghost with the limbs of his corpse. None of that is necessarily interesting or mechanically satisfying, but it at least feels like they wanted to do more than just have Ronan stumble around until you get close enough and center the camera on the object in just the right way to have Ronan examine it, and maybe have a psychic vision.

Like with the narrative, the gameplay just feels like its not living up to its potential. Pun intended. I’d really have liked to see many of the same ideas, but more fleshed out. Or even just better ideas entirely. This is a very interesting detective game, mechanically, in some places, but ultimately its shallow. The investigations aren’t even in very large areas. Few if any of them cover more than one room without being broken up into separate investigations. One of the hub map investigations has you going to a second location, but its only just down the street. Every little puzzle minigame, like choosing words or figuring out which clue will lead you to another clue through Influence, also has a badge rating.

Badges mean nothing. There is no reward for getting three stars. There are no experience points or upgrades. There is no achievement. There are no rewards. You can’t even lose all three badges, so its a 1 to 3 rating of whether you solved the puzzle in one try, in two tries, or in infinite tries. All the badges do is taunt you if you Peek at a cop’s notebook and think Ronan should be interested in the missing residents of the apartment he went to, one of whom you know will later be an important character, only for Ronan to single mindedly be interested in other things.

“Haha, you fool, you were too incompetent to be a master detective.” Fuck you, badges. Compared to Ronan I’m Sherlock Holmes.

I also really do like the climax, and its twists and turns. But as with a lot of the other parts of the game, I think it stumbles a lot in the execution, and some of its bigger moments and even its underlying themes don’t really feel as earned as the writers seem to think they are. Some of the biggest problems center around Ronan himself, although not all of them do.

Ronan’s motivation is to catch the man who killed him, but more than that he wants to pass through the veil and reunite with his lost love. Julia is more of a motivation than simply getting revenge. The player doesn’t really know Julia though. We see how much Ronan loves her in the introduction, between the flashbacks of his life and the tattoos he gets to show his commitment to her, and the way he darkens the rose tattoo when she dies, and later in the way that he’s so glad to see her again when he heads towards the light. When you visit the cemetery, before leaving Ronan chooses to go see Julia’s grave, and sees Rex placing flowers down, telling her how Ronan was killed.

He even snaps at Joy when she argues with him at the museum, worrying that her mother was killed, saying that Cassandra has only been gone for a few days, but if he doesn’t solve the case, he’ll never see Julia again. This game isn’t exactly Oscar worthy, but its a really good scene that highlights what Ronan has on the line. The problem is that we, the player, can’t really share that motivation because we don’t know Julia.

That is, unless you scavenge around for collectibles. One set of them is dozens of Julia’s thoughts, scattered around Dusk like torn out journal pages. Each one of them gives more information about Julia and Ronan’s relationship. There are even a few — far too few — ghostly remnants of memory that show little flashes of them being happy together. These are barely even cutscenes, just static models with too much editing to make them seem dynamic, with a little voiceover, but they’re good. They show more of the personality of a character who’s in some ways integral to the plot but also almost entirely absent from it.

Most of the notes telling Julia’s thoughts are too short. They don’t have the same punch as audiologs that you’d get in more polished games. They’re not even audiologs, they’re all just three or four sentences at most. Its touching that Ronan knows what Lux Aeternia is because Julia had some kind of mental illness. But you really can’t do more than just guess at that or make an assumption unless you find the note that says how glad Julia is that Ronan came with her to the asylum, or the one that tells how him being around helps her. What mental illness did she have? I don’t know. What effect did it have on Ronan, and how was it “hard for him”? I don’t know. If there was a memory related to that, I never found it. Maybe the game never says, and just hopes the player can fill in their own idea.

The strangest part of that belief is that we also accept that the police are violent and brutal. Even in Murdered, none of the police are nice people. Ronan is certainly charming, and at the beginning of each level he gives a hardboiled description of the location, but he’s singleminded and kind of hateful. Its hard to understand why a person like Julia would even like Ronan when even as a cop, there’s plenty of evidence that he’s pretty shitty. One news article even has him breaking a suspect’s arm. He’s cleared of any wrongdoing by an internal investigation, and we’re just supposed to accept that because he’s the protagonist. The police have to push and be violent sometimes, that’s just how it is. You can see this even in other police procedurals that really are more overtly copaganda, like Law and Order: SVU’s Detective Stabler.

Stabler is an angry, hateful person to anyone that he suspects is a criminal, and when he’s proven wrong he rarely apologizes. In fact, more often than not, he’ll be vindicated when a suspect who was previously thought to be innocent — or even who was innocent at the time — goes on to commit a crime. Usually murder, because even though this is the sex crimes show, murder is dramatic. When he does turn out to be wrong or gets someone killed, he’ll at most give a grave, forlorn “whoopsie daisy” look. But the narrative rarely lingers on that. If Stabler is wrong, it often turns out to be the stinger of the episode, to show that sometimes you can’t win them all. He can even be harsh with victims that he thinks aren’t cooperating enough. But he’s our hero, and he’s the Bad Cop, but in our society we just accept that Bad Cops are actually good cops without thinking about just how many people get arrested for things they didn’t do or get coerced into confessions by violent cops who think that criminals don’t deserve rights and that anyone they suspect must be a criminal.

The police are treated as good guys in Soul Suspect. Even Baxter, who at one point becomes a suspect, is treated as being a bad person and a bastard, but not a bad cop, even though he still did something to get demoted down to a uniformed officer from a detective on the Bell Killer case. I’m honestly not sure the game ever says. He hates Ronan, and Rex decks him for it, but in the end he’s vindicated and treated as Not That Bad A Guy™.

The one subversion for this might be the game’s twist, which I actually do think is really good, but I don’t think it set it up enough. At the end of the game, Baxter is shot by the Bell Killer, and joins Ronan in the Dusk, leaving the identity of the Bell Killer uncertain. During the penultimate investigation, Ronan learns that the little Puritan girl from the beginning of the game is the Bell Killer, having drawn her mark in the dirt when she was being sentenced to death by Judge Hathorne for all of her false accusations. She had been manipulating the village of Salem into engaging in a Witch Trials hysteria in order to manipulate the law into carrying out her murders. With the revelation that Rex has disappeared, and that Abigail is going to use the gallows that killed her to take her final victim, Ronan rushes to the Museum to confront her.

did Rex murder him while he was Possessed by Abigail, both Baxter and Ronan were also her pawns, having been Possessed to kill Rose and Sophia, and likely many others. This revelation recontextualizes a lot of the game, with Ronan in a sense looking for a serial killer when really the killer was in the mirror the whole time. Its a cliche plot, but it almost works here.

Ronan being the killer reframes the encounter with Sophia. He was the one that murdered her. Does she know it, when she flees from him? When she implores Ronan to watch her be murdered by a hooded, masked man, does she know that the killer was Ronan? The scene with Sophia is probably one of the best in the game just from how good her animations are, and the way that even without speaking she conveys so much, especially considering the graphics are not all that great. That scene really helps sell the ending, though it still feels like its coming out of left field and that there wasn’t much beyond that to foreshadow it.

Abigail’s revelation as being the killer on the other hand, feels far too telegraphed. When you first meet her, she has creepy ghost girl vibes that just strongly imply she’s up to no good, and later you meet her in the Apartments where she’s drawing mysterious runes that she hides throughout the game. No points for guessing that this is yet another collectible. She claims that these aren’t for Ronan, but unless they’re for herself and she just leaves them all over town for no reason, its never said who or what they are for.

Later on, she’s even seen by the player but not the characters as she watches on from a rooftop and hurries off suspiciously. At this point neither Ronan nor the player actually know her name, but when Ronan examines the gallows at the Museum, a scene plays of her execution, and the Clue mentions her name as being Abigail, which is what he identifies her as later on. It was so obvious that she was up to no good that it feels like the game doesn’t really earn it when she’s revealed to be up to no good. They didn’t put in any effort.

But, even if the two halves of the twist are poorly done in opposite ways, Abigail is still using the officers of the law to enact her punishment on the “witches” of Salem, killing any mediums that she can. She’s been doing this for a long, long time, too, with a display in the Museum restoration room showing off some of her victims over the years and mentioning Salem’s history with psychic police consultants who also mysteriously get murdered. One newspaper in the killer’s hideout even talks about a judge who committed murder but claims that evil spirits made him do it. One little bit of dropped hint, though I don’t think its enough for me.

The ending narration talks about keeping dark sides hidden, and how “even the coldest cops” would forgive the minor crimes that Joy committed to find her mother, and how she’s a better kid than Ronan was. It feels like its trying to draw a parallel between them, but the problem is that even with Joy as almost a deuteragonist, she doesn’t get enough characterization. She doesn’t feel like she has an arc, aside from maybe accepting Ronan’s help more. But the moment she goes “oh, jeez, sorry about your wife, guy” she’s also running off back to the Church and getting captured by the cops. It doesn’t feel like she grows or learns a lesson. And, again, Ronan’s turn from a life of violent crime was ultimately just switching to doing violence to people that is societally appropriate because he has the backing of a badge and state authority.

But death repays debts, I guess. The only debt Ronan ultimately settles is that he knows he was the pawn of a murderer, and he stopped Joy from being murdered. Except she was only even in danger of being murdered because he put her in harm’s way. Abigail didn’t even know about Joy at first, and was after her mother, who Baxter had sent to a safe-house. Its a bit hollow of an end otherwise decent enough if unpolished finale to a decent enough if unpolished game. You don’t even really fight or have to contend with Abigail in any way, you just press X to finish the game and then a cutscene happens and you learn the shocking twist and then Ronan is almost dragged to Hell but he… just pulls Abigail into the Lost Souls instead and she dies. Again, I mean, since ghosts can do that here. And then you get this voice over about dark sides and being a good kid. It doesn’t feel earned, or even related to much else in the game.

Oh, right. And then Ronan gets to go to Heaven, or wherever the ghosts in this setting go. The last shot is Ronan hearing Joy call out to him from off screen and smiling.

The story of the game isn’t bad, but it really did need a redraft. Much of the game feels a bit like filler, even aside from all of the running around in empty or nearly empty locations and the extremely too large hub area. The twists don’t work as well as they could because they’re not set up well, and while the mechanics of solving an investigation are good on paper, many of the actual clues and the questions being asked can feel tacked on and unnecessary, like going all the way to the Church and having Ronan ask “why am I here?”. Picking the Church clue that led you to the Church is the obvious answer, which just completes the vision that Ronan was already experiencing.

Its not all on Ronan, though. Once again, Abigail’s set up as the true villain comes almost out of nowhere. She shows up just enough to get the player to go “oh, I bet she’s important”, but then doesn’t become important. There’s no indication she’s a murderer until the reveal, and when Ronan gets a flash of her death, she’s the one being executed for being a scourge on Salem. What’s more, while she’s acting as the Bell Killer, she demands that each girl denounce their contract with demons. Then when she’s revealed she’s the killer, she’s also got the ability to summon demons!

She at least summons Lost Souls to make it so you have to curve your path slightly during the dramatic moment where you have to get to Joy in time. Its not uncommon for villains to be hypocritical, and especially in supernatural fiction for them to use supernatural abilities to kill other people with supernatural abilities. But she knows what Demons are like. They aren’t intelligent, she even warns Ronan about their atavistic nature. She’s had about three hundred years and change to realize that Demons don’t make contracts. It would be like telling someone to renounce their contract with wolves, or bears. They don’t make contracts. They’re dumb animals.

Its also weird that she wants them to renounce their contract with demons, as opposed to something more specific, like Satan, or Lucifer, or “The Devil”. I can only assume that this slight deviation from the standard witch narrative, along with the more anime inspired look of the Demons is possibly due to the Japanese Square-Enix people involved in the creation of the game. The teams talked about having incidents where they didn’t realize that the other culture’s assumptions about ghosts were so different from their own. This might also explain why Ronan is so ignorant about his hometown’s very famous history to the point that it takes him so long to put it together. Soul Suspect was intended to appeal to westerners, but it still released in Japan, so it needed to be accessible to a Japanese audience that wouldn’t be quite so familiar with Salem and its history of witchcraft.

Of course, its not like the American team seems to have done much research, either. There are small nods to the actual history of witch trials, like the use of the name Abigail Williams and Johnathan Hathorne, but so much more is changed or left out entirely.

The “witches” themselves are shown to have been women who were able to communicate with ghosts. This isn’t horrible or anything, and is at least better than beloved 90s classic Hocus Pocus — which gives the implication that the women murdered as witches really were both witches and evil, making the practice of executions justified within that narrative — but its mixed with Abigail’s father torturing her to accuse his personal enemies as witches. Since the game never really goes into Abigail’s motivations, it confusingly leaves the impression that her father’s enemies were other young women.

It is true that in the historical witch trials feuds and pettiness and politics spilled over into fanning the flames of mass hysteria and possible ergot poisoning. John and Elizabeth Proctor would be the most famous example of this due to Arthur Miller’s play and movie The Crucible, where an aged up Abigail Miller wants to have an affair with an aged down John Proctor. But within this setting, the only man called a witch is an unnamed Puritan who shows up in a spectral vision getting crushed by heavy rocks. I’d argue that it was probably a reference to Giles Corey, the only person in America to suffer the fate of being pressed to death. Except that Giles was 81 at the time instead of vaguely 30, and they leave out the impressively bold “more weight” line.

lines tops, seems both horrified of all the women who were murdered, but also seems to blame Abigail entirely, as if he wasn’t the one to sentence them all to death. True to his reputation, here in the game John “The Hanging Judge” Hathorne sentences Abigail to the gallows as well.

There’s so much of the actual history of the setting they chose that just goes completely unused. For instance, did you know that the first woman accused of starting all of this, and teaching Sarahs Good and Osbourne the lure of Satan, was a slave named Tituba? She was an indigenous woman from somewhere in South America or the Caribbean, taken as a slave by Samuel Parris when he was in Barbados. She confessed to knowing of things like ways to ward off evil and other spiritual practices like making “witch cake”, which is rye bread and piss that you feed to a dog to see if you’re being bewitched. Later she confessed to full on witchcraft and accused the Sarahs of the same. Of course, she also confessed to having been beaten by Parris and told what to say, which probably explains why all the witchcraft she claimed to have performed and all the demons that were said to be conjured were all culturally European instead of Carib or Vodoun.

If any of this is incorrect, its probably because I’m piecing together the history of the witch trials based on looking at a handful of Wikipedia articles, which still seems to have been more than Airtight Studios did.

Tituba’s absence from the game isn’t really surprising. The witch trials as an actual event are barely relevant, but more than that, the game completely ignores the existence of any Native or Black people. They seemingly don’t exist in this version of Salem. I seriously can’t remember seeing a Black person in the entire town, and despite telling me about workers from Salem that went to build the Panama canal and caught yellow fever or Spanish Flu or something and other meaningless historical trivia, the game never mentions the history of indigenous settlements all throughout the area of Massachusetts. I’m sure most people won’t think of it, but once I started to it was really noticeable that this version of Salem, though filled with remnants of fires and shipwrecks and plagues and other historical tragedies, never mentions the history of colonization and slavery.

Massachusetts had no slaves by 1790, but there was still a history of it all the same. They were the first place in New England to get slaves. It was a center of abolitionist movements. Black people existed in both Salem’s past and present, and there really should be some Naumkeag ghosts hanging around.

Speaking of ghosts hanging around, its time to talk about one of my favourite — but still disappointingly underused — parts of the game.

where its just highschoolers dealing with ghost problems, and the player characters, freshly dead, decided to look into rumours that their school was haunted. They uncovered a twisty story of jealousy when a nerdy AV kid was murdered because the popular girl was into him, and eventually learning that their teacher had killed her crush when she was a student. The ghost’s killer was revealed, and confronted, and absolution was reached. 

Probably. I mean, this was ten years ago, I don’t actually remember the specifics.

I keep coming back to an idea I have for stories focused on a necromancer detective, who gets caught up in helping ghosts and solving supernatural crimes. I really like the idea of ghost detectives.

Which is why its so disappointing that Soul Suspect doesn’t really lean into this much. The side cases are such a good part of the game, but there are only like four of them and they don’t really happen beyond the first few chapters of the game. Its like they had this good idea but were pressed for time. Or maybe they didn’t want the hub to be so empty of anything meaningful, so they put a few in at the last minute.

The cases themselves aren’t anything to write home about individually. A woman who was murdered in an apartment and stuffed into the boiler. A woman at the beach who died trying to save the victims of a shipwreck. A guy next to his crashed car who worries he killed his friends (who apparently didn’t leave behind ghosts to answer that question). A woman who thinks her boyfriend killed her to marry someone else.

None of them are good. They all involve wandering around small locations to search for clues. The woman who drowned needs you to do nothing more than wander the beach and Reveal the objects, then solve the mystery. They don’t get much more complicated, though the drunk guy at least requires you to go to a separate location to do more investigating.

Like with everything else about investigations, this could have been so much better, and thinking about what it could have been just makes me so disappointed. There could have been more of these. They would have been more interesting than a dozen collectibles in each level. They could have been spread out more, so that the clues don’t just exist within twenty feet of the ghosts. It would have been nice if they were treated like actual quests that you could investigate throughout the game, finding clues all over town instead of simply Revealing a newspaper and a framed photograph right next to the ghost that wonders how she died. It just makes the ghost feel incompetent. Sure, she’s been here since the ’20s, and her mind is probably going, but this wasn’t a difficult mystery. The echoes of her death are practically sitting out in the open, not even half-buried in sand.

Later on, when Ronan goes to see Julia’s grave, Rex has come from the police station, where you saw him earlier with flowers, arguing with another cop to find Joy. He places the flowers down and talks to his sister, telling her that he’s sorry, and Ronan just watches over him, saying a solemn “she knows already”. Its so good.

Also throughout the entire Goddamned game Ronan is smoking a cigarette. If he’s not actively smoking it, he’s waving it around in cutscenes. Early on he flicks the ghost cigarette at Baxter, but in the next scene its somehow back in his hand so that he can wave it about. Its a ridiculous character tic and I love it so much. Someone please tell Square-Enix to remake this game. I wish it were better and that it were popular.

Thank you for reading, if indeed you still are. I’m not sure how to feel about this one. I thought I liked this game, but after writing this I’m not sure if I do anymore. I’ll probably give it a third pass when I get around to making this a video essay and potentially revisit my thoughts, but for now I’m pushing through and publishing this. I hope it at least was an interesting read, even if I didn’t convince you this game is worth your time.

If you did get this far, though, give me a clap or two, share this article around, and give me all the proper forms of engagement. Every time you engage with my work, the serotonin goes beep.

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Next time, I’ll finally get around to writing about Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines.

Nah, not really. I’m probably going to write something shorter, and then I’ll talk about Remedy’s Control once I play through the AWE expansion, and maybe Alan Wake.