I just finished it after thinking about playing it for five years.
It was okay. I really enjoyed it, but it was just okay.
It's really interesting to have a game that has almost no combat emphasis whatsoever. There are maybe five or six "combat encounters," but they're all over in about 45 seconds and never present anything that could be considered a challenge. The bulk of the gameplay is just walking around and looking at stuff and exploring the environment. Another mechanic I thought was interesting was the ability to walk through anything that isn't ghostly, meaning almost all of the levels in the game were basically a flat floor plan. It was really hard to deal with at first and made navigating spaces super confusing, but once you adjusted your mind to deal with that, you could move about pretty efficiently.
Another thing I really liked were the ghost stories. Each area of the game had a series of collectibles that you could gather to unlock a ghost story, which was pretty much a campfire spooky story in the vein of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, accompanied by a drawing. They were pretty well done and featured easily the best voice acting in the game. The one one that you find in the apartments and that one in the mental asylum were my favourites (although Yuri Lowenthal's was terrible. He's just... not a good VA. Sorry. Not even as Spider-man).
Speaking of mental asylum, the game does make some missteps. The entire trek through the asylum is like a gathering of the worst tropes about mental illness packed into a half hour of gameplay, culminating in a conversation with someone they describe as paranoid schizophrenic. She's locked in a cell, drawing on the walls in crayon, and screaming unintelligibly. ...yeah. There's also some clumsy side stories about drunk driving and suicide and infanticide (ft. the lowest-poly dead baby I've ever had the displeasure of seeing), but by and large the story and side content range from "alright" to "surprisingly good." Big shout out to Jason Brooks for giving Ronan a pretty likeable personality.
This game's biggest enemy was its budget, though. The animations can be weird and janky, the interface occasionally unresponsive, and I had more than a few bugs that required me to reload checkpoints. There are characters who will say one line as one VA, and then have their inner monologue voiced by someone completely different. The combat itself reeks of something that was put in the game against the wishes of anyone involved, and it exists only to be a bullet point on the back of the box; I can't help but feel that they should have spent less time on typical gameplay - i.e. combat and collectibles and navigating the world - and put their time into tightening up the story and core presentation.
Overall, despite its budget feel and messy handling, it was a fun ride. The story is easy to predict but plays out in an enjoyable way (though writing this, I'm realizing that a lot of it is made up of fridge logic), and putting detective work and clue gathering at the forefront of the game makes it more engaging than it would have been if told traditionally. The detective mechanics are vague and occasionally obtuse but more often than not, they make you actually think about intent and context and encourage you to actively participate with the story unfolding. In a lot of ways, Return of the Obra Dinn is this game without any of the fat. A razor-focused, laser-sharp detective game that forces you to really understand the characters involved. As it stands now, Soul Suspect is a bumpy-but-fun adventure game ride buoyed by nonstandard mechanics and carried largely by Jason Brooks' solid portrayal of the main character. If that sounds like fun to anyone, I do recommend it.
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