Walk through NPCs like you walk through walls.Such limitations extend to your toolbox. The developer didn’t have time to make a bigger, more interesting world, in other words. The explanation for this feels arbitrary: Ronan can’t pass through other ghostly matter because he’s a ghost, and he can’t access three quarters of the town’s buildings as they’ve been ‘consecrated’ by Salem’s citizens. One of its more interesting features a ghostly overlay of parts of the town during its most notorious years in the 1600s, is mostly used as an environmental trick to prevent you from going beyond the game world’s close confines. Murdered’s small sandbox, (truly the loosest use of that term), offers little variation in environment and restricts the player's natural instinct to explore it at every turn. Similarly, Salem, with its rich real-life history, feels wasted as a setting. The supporting cast fails to make an impression too, save for Joy, a spirited young medium - terrifically voiced by Entourage actress Cassidy Lehrmam - who deserves more screen-time. An insistent yet irrelevant sub-plot involving Ronan’s wife, for example, evokes a particularly clunky romance novella, while the thoughts of possessed citizens that Ronan is able to hear are oddly mundane.
It’s a powerful whodunnit set-up, which kept me invested - just - for the ten hours it took to reach the reveal, despite narrative shortcomings elsewhere.
Yet the mystery lying at his feet is more unusual than most, as Ronan has a series of bulletholes in his chest and his ‘unfinished business’ is to discover the identity of his own killer.
Our hero Ronan is a roughly sketched amalgam of every anti-authority, lone-wolf detective popularised in film during the late ‘60s and early ‘70s a gravel-voiced cliche under a fedora.
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