Less than a month after the release of Murdered: Soul Suspect, Airtight Games appears to have closed its doors. The Airtight website remains active but Geekwire reported yesterday that its office has been shut down, and the studio posted a cryptic tweet earlier this afternoon that sounded distinctively like a farewell.
Detective games have always been difficult to pull off. Mysteries are about fluidity of meaning—intuition, third options, non-binary solutions to binary-seeming problems. Most games are binary by their nature; you're right or wrong, you win or you lose. In this regard, Murdered: Soul Suspect sets a high bar for itself. It's an adventure game about a detective, Ronan O'Connor, who is killed in the game's opening moments. As a ghost, he uses spectral powers to investigate crime scenes in the hopes of solving his own murder. The challenge of creating an interactive mystery is augmented by a protagonist who can possess people and listen to their thoughts, walk through walls, and touch objects to see their history.
I've seen a lot of trailers for Murdered: Soul Suspect in my time, and I remain cautiously optimistic about Airtight Games' ghostly detective drama, despite the fact that its deceased cop hero looks like a particularly unpleasant spectre to be inhabiting for the length of a game. This latest video is a good one, explaining neatly what the game involves, how Ronan O'Connor came to lose his life (but not how he came by such an awful name), and revealing a few of the neat tricks Ghost Cop will be able to pull off throughout the game. You probably shouldn't watch it if you want to go in cold, but it may put Murdered on your radar if you've been shrugging it off until now. I don't know how to resolve this dilemma, but I do know how to embed videos into website posts. Stick around to see this skill in action.
By now you’ve probably heard about Square Enix’s Murdered: Soul Suspect, or Ghost Cop, as I like to call it. It’s a little hard to wrap your head around what Soul Suspect actually plays like. Is it a shooter? An adventure game? A match-3 game? Well, probably not the latter, but if you want to know what Murdered: Soul Suspect is all about, its recently released "101" trailer should get you up to speed.
Airtight's Murdered: Soul Suspect is the one that's a bit like the Blackwell games, a bit like haunted pottery film Ghost, and a lot like Ghost Trick. You're a cop trying to solve his own murder, and while you don't have Whoopi Goldberg around to help you out, you do have a young girl who appears to be next on your killer's People To Off list. How can you help the living when you can't touch, talk or change into a less bullet-riddled set of clothes? Possession, my friend, which may or may not be shown off in this new, incredibly fast-paced trailer.
"Most people think that death is the end, but for me it was only the beginning." So narrates the unlikely named Ronan O'Connor in the latest Murdered: Soul Suspect trailer, proving that cliche exists in the spectral realm too. To recap: you're a dead detective, and you're trying to solve your own murder. You also battle demons because, hey, why not - your day's not likely to get any worse.
E3 might be dead and gone for another year, but its noisy spirit lives on the form of gameplay footage, which has been trickling out ever since. The latest is for Airtight Games' cheery Murdered: Soul Suspect, in which you play a dead cop trying to solve his own murder. It's a bit like Ghost! Only with less Whoopi Goldberg, presumably. The bumper 25-minute video crams in plenty of investigation and exorcism, but I'm most impressed by your ability to walk through walls without the aid of a no_clip cheat.
NORMAL DIMENSION: Yet to try this reality bending puzzler from one of Portal's creators? Now you can, with this new demo on Steam. Now available in all known dimensions. But not on Origin.
FLUFFY DIMENSION: OMG EVERYTHING IS AMAZING! LIKE, YOU PRESS BUTTONS AND STUFF HAPPENS, AND SOMETIMES YOU THROW SAFES AT LASERS, AND THEY SORTA MELT, BUT IT'S OKAY, BECAUSE YOU GET AS MANY OF THEM AS YOU NEED AND SO YAY!
Quantum Conundrum is being developed by Portal creator Kim Swift. It's a first person puzzler in which you play a twelve your old boy lost in his mad scientist uncle's underground laboratory. It's full of safes, switches, lava and vast gaps with no bridges. This would be a serious problem but for the fact that you can switch between five dimensions, each of which affects matter differently. By switching between world on the fly, otherwise immovable objects like safes can be tossed, stacked and even surfed to make it past the mad machines and laserbeams that every mad scientist installs in their homes as standard. It's all demonstrated perfectly in the walkthrough video above from Gametrailers, spotted on RPS. It's out early this year, and looks rather good, don't you think?
Kim Swift, designer of Portal and Left 4 Dead, was just not cut out for working at the swiftly-growing Valve, she explained to Gamasutra last week. The increasing team sizes and tightening deadlines clashed with her preference for a democratic design process that lets everyone "have a say in what they work on" and for small teams with a "fun, almost family-like atmosphere."
The more relaxed atmosphere of her sixteen-person team at Square Enix's Airtight Games is letting Swift and her team find the fun in their upcoming physics platformer Quantum Conundrum.
