Story: 4/5
So the game's about Ronan, a detective who gets killed while trying to catch a serial killer named "The Bell Killer." Upon death, Ronan wakes up in ghost form where he can see living people but they can't see him. The exceptions are mediums who can interact with both the living and dead. A teenage girl named Joy is one such medium and she sets out with Ronan to find her missing mother Cassandra, who is also a medium, and may be the Bell Killer's next target. Without spoiling anything, I'll just say that the story's pretty interesting and original (at least for games) and leave it at that. The only thing that kept me from giving the story a 5/5 is that Ronan's dead wife is a mere afterthought in the game, and Ronan shows very little emotion towards her memory at all. In fact, after visiting his wife's grave, he strolls out of the graveyard with his little "swagger-strut-while-smoking-a-cigarette" animation that is used ad nauseum. Shouldn't he be feeling blue after visiting his wife's grave instead of acting like he's too cool to be bothered with things like emotion? The writers missed out on a chance to give this game an emotional side that it lacks. Still an interesting "whodunit" story though.
Immersion: 1/5
This is where the game lost me. So once Ronan wakes up in ghost form, he learns that he can't really interact with the physical world anymore, which is made evident when he tries to punch his killer and his fist goes right through the killer's face. Ronan can also pass through objects like tables, beds and interior walls. Exceptions are exterior walls which he can't pass through (because they were consecrated). Fine, I'm good with all that. But the game breaks it's own continuity several times. For example, Ronan continues chain smoking cigarettes throughout the entire game. Are these "spiritual" cigarettes? Because it's already been established that he can't interact with the physical world anymore. And why would a ghost still have the need to smoke anyway? It makes no sense. And believe me, there might be 30 total seconds of this game where Ronan's not smoking. I understand that the idea was to give Ronan an edgy personality, but the whole smoking thing just doesn't work here. There are also many times when Ronan seems to forget that living beings can't hurt or see him. For example, in cut scenes where he's helping Joy sneak through a police station, he tends to hide behind corners himself, forgetting that the officers can't see him anyway. There's also a scene where he's trying to get close to a stray cat, and he approaches the cat cautiously as if the cat's going to scratch his hand.
Also, Ronan has multiple felonies in his background, so how exactly did he pass his background check to become a cop in the first place? He's also covered in tattoos including his hands and neck. Most police departments would eliminate him as an applicant based on those alone. There's a note that Ronan finds from his dead wife and she mentions that neither she nor Ronan are religious. But in the very next scene, Ronan finds a dead priest and does the Catholic heart cross. Maybe he's just paying respect to the dead priest and his religion, but most people who aren't Catholic aren't going to perform a Catholic ritual. All of these things make it hard to suspend disbelief!
Gameplay: 3/5
This is not an action game, it's a detective game. So given that, you'd think the developers would nail that aspect of the gameplay down. Well, they don't. Essentially what you do is go around a crime scene and try to find all of the clues. When you find one, a button prompt will appear and you'll press the button to affirm the clue. Once all the potential clues are gathered, you press a button to conclude the investigation. At this point, the game will ask you what the 3 most relevant clues are that you gathered. Most of the time this is a pretty easy process of elimination, as the clues that are irrelevant will be obvious. Ultimately this makes the game too easy. There are times, however, that a seemingly relevant clue will be deemed irrelevant by the game. It seems to almost be arbitrary, which ruins any sense of intuition the game wants you to have. I don't want to knock them too much for this, because we're dealing with abstract ideas here and video games are typically binary, so it's hard to blend the two together. I applaud their effort in trying to do something fresh, but it just didn't work as well here as a game of this genre should. Examples of games that do it well are Condemned, Condemned 2 and Silent Hill Shattered Memories. Those games found a way to really make you feel like it was YOU that figured something out, instead of just telling the game what it wants to hear so that you can progress.
Quality: 3/5
The graphics aren't bad, but there's nothing mind blowing about them. The animations are merely passable. You'll see some of the same 3D model of characters used over and over, sometimes in the same room. Possessing citizens of Salem and listening to their thoughts is a unique idea, but once again it kills immersion when 2 people in the same room that look exactly the same happen to have an identical thought going through their head.
Side activities: 2/5
There are a slew of collectibles, and a small handful of side investigations you can complete, but none of them are all that compelling and I found myself ignoring them so I could advance the main storyline instead.
Trailer
Gameplay
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