Opening Shot: 25 Mins Of Murdered: Soul Suspect

Just as it took me over a decade to get pun in "Diagon Alley" (Don't judge me: I got it after walking through it on the Harry Potter Tour. Hmm, I sense further judging after that revelation...), I only just noticed that Murdered: Soul Suspect was a pun. They slipped it in like a clove in tasty rice. In this case, the "soul" part refers to the fact that the detective investigating a murder is a ghost and is looking into his own death, but also to the idea that he's hunting down a single suspect. Anyway, I have no sympathy for the profane main character. He has a silly hat and he is a smoker.

Eric Studer, Senior designer of Murdered: Soul Suspect, is here with a helpful Let's Play of the opening scenes, showing off how the player will interact with crime scenes and the people that gather around them. Being incorporeal, he has to possess the police and witnesses to figure out what they know. He can't take control of this person, but he can at least gleam some knowledge from being in their body. Or as Eric puts it: "But if I possess officer Robinson and listen through his ears..."

Plot twist: it'll turn out you are the killer of yourself, because of smoking. The bullet holes in the body are actually your soul escaping. Soul holes.

I quite like the word game where you put together the bits of your investigation, but there are a few arbitrary quirks that stand out: the player can't manipulate things in the real world, apart from that time he turns on an oven? I hope there's a reasonable explanation for that. Maybe he was also a chef-detective in the real world?

It's out 2014.