Murdered: Soul Suspect

Despite the freedom of movement, the investigation needs to be done in a linear way. Starting with his own crime scene, O'Connor needs to collect different types of clues to move on to new locations and progress through the story. Each location has a number of clues to discover, but only the crucial ones need to be found. To advance, he then needs to answer questions about the scene in the form of a puzzle, built up through the clues. After guessing successfully, the game moves on, usually to a new environment.

The player is allowed to make mistakes as it only leads to a lower ranking of the puzzle. Even though O'Connor can examine the environment, he is not able to interact with it directly. He has however access to a number of powers that allow him to influence people, eavesdrop on conversations, possess people directly and peek. Certain areas can only be reached by possessing a cat and sneaking inside.

Joy, a little teen medium he meets early on, who explains the world to him and often acts as a sarcastic sidekick, is an essential part of his journey. They need to work together as Joy can manipulate the environment to help him. In these stealth sections O'Connor often needs to distract people using his presence and poltergeist actions to clear the way.

The game features various types of stealth action segments, including encounters with demons that roam various locations. O'Connor can execute them out by sneaking up from behind and performing a combination of keys and buttons. If they spot him however, he needs to quickly shift between ectoplasm hiding spots in the environment to stay out of their way.

Starting with the four initial powers, O'Connor learns new abilities throughout the game, such as teleportation across short distances, telekinesis to a limited degree, and the ability to pick up memory residue that introduces memories he can visit as if in a movie to find clues for the investigation. There are 242 optional collectibles to collect: nine sets of artifacts, and eight sets of artifacts for all the ghost stories.