When you're not poking around looking for clues, you're trotting around a sort-of open-world version of Salem, Massachusetts. A lot depends on your willingness to play along, to act the great detective - but when that runs dry, a little bit of guess work generally gets the job done, since there's no meaningful penalty for making mistakes (unless you care about the half-hearted scoring system which ranks each puzzle out of three). You don't even need to find every clue, provided you can use what you do know to pick out the right key words.

The game is full of collectables but, annoyingly, once you reach the end, there's no way to go back and finish finding them all. It's not the most graceful representation of the detective's art, but it is a more compelling take on the genre than the rummage sale of irrelevant detritus that typified LA Noire.

Moving the story forwards requires you to find and identify the most relevant clues. This makes up a good chunk of the gameplay and tasks you with finding a certain number of bits of info by exploring a tightly defined location, examining everything. It's an adventure game, basically, right down to the often frustrating hunt for clues. This you do by using your ghost powers - and, yes, one of the characters explains them to you using that very term - to poke around crime scenes and read the minds of other characters. You rely instead on brains, as you try to solve the mystery of your own murder so that you can find peace and be reunited with your dead wife in the comforting glow of The Other Side. Ghosts can't pick up guns and their fists tend to float right through whatever they try to hit, and since you're a ghost - the ghost of detective Ronan O'Connor, killed while investigating a serial murderer known as The Bell Killer - this can't help but restrict your options when it comes to violence.

It's a testament to the game's peculiar strengths that it manages to feel like an action game while cleverly distracting you from the fact you're not actually getting much action. Nor, it turns out, will I shoot or punch anyone for the remainder of the game. I'm over halfway through Murdered: Soul Suspect when I realise something: I've not shot or punched anyone during the whole time I've been playing. A curious and offbeat detective adventure that makes up in personality what it lacks in depth and technical polish.

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