This game was… weird, in a lot of ways.

So on the gameplay front I actually quite liked it. This is exactly what I was hoping MURDERED SOUL SUSPECT TM would be — you’re a ghost who can possess people, read minds, get into locked rooms, manipulate objects, etc. The game seems to have been made in an RPGMaker/Wolfrpg/etc. engine (I spent way too much time trying to figure out which one and couldn’t) and has the clunkiness you’d expect from that, but aside from that I enjoyed floating around and talking to people and using different people to access different areas etc.

That said… well. There is a long-running meme in fandom culture known as the Eight Deadly Words, coined by SFF author Dorothy Jones Heydt: “I don’t care what happens to these people.” The idea is that a narrative has fundamentally failed when the reader stops caring about the characters.

I hated everyone in this game. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a cast populated by such terrible, unlikeable, whiny-ass people. While Xu and Marcurio were the worst, everyone sucked in their own way. The only person who was sympathetic was Gwen, but she spends large swaths of the game either refusing to or unable to communicate. Xu really was the worst, just insufferable. Walking around talking about how she objectively has the hardest life, ever, and it justifies her doing as many terrible things as she wants, all while the game acts like she’s a totally normal person — I have no idea how you end up writing a character like this without a hint of irony.

I initially thought the direction the game was going was that everyone was going to realize they were all so caught up in the idea that their problems were uniquely difficult only to realize that they were, literally, all in the same boat, and were better served by tackling hardship together instead of seeing each other as competition. Community as resistance etc etc. Like, this is so obviously the direction this should go that the “same boat” metaphor is right there, it literally takes place on a boat, but that just… never happens. In fact, not only do the characters never really open up to each other, they don’t grow or change or learn anything. We never even find out why Alton is so anxious and suddenly flunked school, why Donovan left the cops, why Marcurio feels like he can’t get a job anywhere else, why Paulo is psychic (???), what happened to the captain to make her take this job so suddenly, what happened to the old captain… the list goes on. And none of them learn anything from the experience — there are functionally only two endings here, and no matter how fully you solve the mystery it doesn’t change that everyone ends exactly where they started. And no one faces any consequences! Xu and Marcurio have been aiding and abetting a human trafficking operation, only technically not realizing when anyone with a functioning brainstem would have because they were sticking their fingers in their ears and going LA LA LA, and you expect me to believe they just get to walk away??

Huge swaths of the cast just repeat that they don’t care about anything that’s going on and just want to be left alone, a baffling decision, and no one seems concerned that there’s no one to drive the boat, it’s just bonkers. The only likeable person is actually the ghost, but the silent-protag thing means that we don’t really get to engage with them — the whole thing would have been better with, say, between-chapter cutscene flashbacks showing the captain investigating. She seemed cool, but her being dead before we get there means we can’t attach ourselves to her.

And the endings were so annoying. There’s no way to save right before the final confrontation, you have to go through a long, unskippable sequence each time, and infuriatingly, despite claiming there are five endings, there are only two — I was SO irritated to go through all the effort of seeing the best one only to find out it was exactly the same as the other 2 partially-good endings. Though that no one reacts differently no matter what happens does feel on brand for these terrible, terrible people.

More irritatingly, the game just… never follows up on Paolo and the captain, lol? In the bad ends, you see Paolo as like a vegetable or whatever, but in the good ones you don’t see him at all?? And in none of the endings do we find out what happened to the ghost. Is she still haunting the ship…? Did she just vanish after the denouement? Did she ascend into heaven? Is she with Paolo? Who the ♥♥♥♥ knows, she’s only the main character.

The plot here was decent. I found it to be predictable and it was clear who the culprit was early. I continue to not enjoy sexual abuse as a way to signal a story is serious without any examination of the culture that produces it; I find it both emotionally manipulative and dismissive. The game seemed to want to say something about mental health, and its portrayal of Gwen and Darryl were good and sensitive, but it couldn’t help but edge into “you can cure PTSD with ghosts” stuff which is always irritating.

But honestly the biggest problem is just how completely unlikable the characters were. The biggest disappointment for me was that in the worst ending some of them still survive, I wanted them all shot down.