Prior to E3 I had never heard of this title and it wasn’t until I was on the Square Enix booth tour that I found it. I was able to get into a theater presentation for the game and I went from having zero knowledge and interest in the game to being very interested indeed. Murdered looks like a very unique title offering up some gameplay systems not unlike others we’ve seen in the past but delivered in a new and fresh way.

Taking place in Salem, Massachusetts, Murdered follows a police detective who is killed by a mystery attacker in the line of duty and finds himself outside of his body as a ghost. He then has no choice but to solve his own murder. This is not an easy task, however, as he is very much a ghost and unable to directly interact with objects or talk to people. Picture LA Noire but with ghosts where possession takes the place of interrogation.

The clue system is not unlike LA Noire or Arkham City but with some added elements that require word matching to find the right clue details. When enough of the clues are revealed a psychic impression is available that allows the player to see a portion of the crime. This in turn leads to new areas to search and new clues to find.

In addition to clues you can look at, the player can hop into people to ‘possess’ them, a process that is less like possession and more like hitching a ride. This allows you to hear what they are saying, ride places with them and influence their thoughts with your own clues. In this way you can use people around you as tools to put pieces together and open up new avenues of investigation.

These avenues are not just paths of thought but also buildings and areas. While your character can generally pass through pretty much any wall or object in the environment, the exterior doors of buildings are blessed from Salem’s late unpleasantness and you can not pass through them unless someone or something breaks the seal first. For this reason, the player needs to be creative in how to infuse people with ideas or manipulate them into going where he wants them to at any given time. There are certain objects in the environment that the character can make malfunction that will distract or attract NPCs and goad them into doing the player’s bidding. Certainly the game play puts an emphasis on thinking outside the box.

The whole thing isn’t investigation, however. There are enemies in the game called demons that are in reality souls who have lingered too long in the nether realm and want desperately to get back. These things believe that stealing the souls of the living and dead alike will help them become alive again. These demons cannot be defeated directly and the player has to sneak up on them and possess them from behind and then tear them apart from the inside out. This can be accomplished through garden variety stealth as well as more creative methods like catching a ride in a person and then jumping into the demon.

Aside from demons, the character can also interact with other ghosts who are trapped until their business is finished. The demo showed one such ghost who could not pass on until she found where her body had been buried. The character then goes to investigate a lead she gives and through his investigative skills finds where her body is buried. There is no real indication what finishing side quests actually does for you but the content includes more than just  linearly solving your own murder. There is also a separate mystery surrounding spectral graffiti that is trying to lead you in a particular direction.

The 20 minutes I saw of the game is about all I know but judging by what they showed the game looks pretty interesting and if the various elements are implemented properly and all come together as they should it will be a lot of fun to play. The idea of being a ghost is novel and the game play that stems from that looks pretty awesome.  There are some aspects of the game that seem a little silly like how the character is smoking a cigarette when he is killed and keeps the thing in his mouth after being cracked in the face with a baseball bat and thrown out the window with little damage to the cigarette itself, but whatever, it looks pretty cool anyway.

Murdered Soul Suspect is set for release in 2014 for PS3 and Xbox 360.