Shadows of Doubt (2024)

A really exciting premise that is unfortunately, in my experience, completely non-functional. Over the course of my time I picked up 6 cases and solved 1. Even my one success never led to an actual arrest - it would have required staking out the perps workplace for 12+ hours waiting for their next shift to start and my time in the procedurally generated city of New Caledon ended before those 12 hours passed. Because each and every clue is proc-gen with seemingly very little internal logic between which clues are created for a case I frequently ran into situations in which cases were functionally unsolvable.

You go to the victims house, you find how they died, who they know, where they work, their medical history - and depending on how the dice roll on clues that's it. OK fine if these systems allowed for more actual detective work that'd be alright, I'd go around and question friends, roommates, and coworkers for clues. Alas your only options to question people are: "Seen anything suspicious?" "No." (this is the only answer you will ever get. I questioned dozens and dozens of citizens across my cases no one ever saw anything suspicious) and "do you know you [person]?" "Yes, I have seen them before in [name of building they live in]" (Again all you will ever get is an unhelpfully general location and perhaps a marginally helpful personal tidbit like that they have high blood pressure or wear glasses).

The most indicative example of this, and my final case before giving up, involved a kidnapping victim. When I spoke with the victim's roommate she begged me to solve the kidnapping of her friend. I then prompted her to tell me personal details about the victim - she flat out refused. I then asked to search the apartment - she told me to screw off. Thus I was forced to wait for the roommate to go to sleep so I could break in to their apartment and try and solve her friend's kidnapping. Once in, I was able to find a handful of notes mentioning a stalker. Now here is everything I was able to find out about this stalker from the notes: He is male, he is tall, he is average, he is short. The notes specify that this was not multiple men following her, but one tall average short man. Already off to a great start, but now what can I do? The only clues that were generated were notes about this stalker and a note indicating she had met an unnamed person at a diner hours before.

So I head to the diner and ask about my victim - but all anyone you question could possibly tell you is "yes I saw her, yes she was at this cross street some time today" which I already knew. It's not possible to ask follow ups or get more information (was she with someone at the diner? Was anyone following her?) so that lead gets me nothing. Now I'm left with my quantum height stalker who I can't ask anyone about because I don't know anything about him other than the contradictory info about how tall he is. Is he someone that lives in her building? Someone she works with? Just a random creep from the neighborhood? I don't know and I can't find out because the game does not allow you to question people about someone unless you have enough information for a suspect card, which I don't, so that's it. I wander the town for hours, I check out the grimy basement where the kidnappers have told me to leave the impossibly high ransom amount. No clues here, there's no reason for the kidnappers to have come here anyway. In a final bid of desperation I go back to the roommate and offer her 50 bucks if she'll tell me more about her kidnapped friend, she tells me it's none of my business, and slams the door.

The game reminds me my victim will be killed if I don't find her within the next hour and half. Perhaps this is all a scathing reminder that in reality the majority of murders go unsolved.

Steam Curator

Shadows of Doubt is a game of trade offs, the most significant of which is smack dab in the middle of its premise.

Because shadows of doubt is a playable detective drama without the drama, divorcing the mystery and intrigue of classic detective stories from the fundamental act of detectiving itself.

Procedurally generated victims, suspects, and witnesses can’t deliver unique “aha!” moments in the same way a more curated experience can, but it overshadows that limitation with an abundance of choice and freedom.

The result is an immersive sim that’s clunky and masterful in the same breath, a must play indie title even if, at times, it feels more like an excellent detective framework than it does an excellent detective game.

The elephant in the room is that Shadows of Doubt is early access, and you don’t need to be a detective to deduce that. Starting the game and generating your world demands a profoundly long load screen as your shops, streets, and all the random inhabitants and their complexities are formed.

Far more pernicious is the fact that those complexities weigh on your experience after that initial load too: Shadows of Doubt is a game that buckles under your inputs. Weird bugs and flickering textures are frequent but no flaw is as acutely felt as consistent frame drops at nearly all times.

You’re in buyer beware territory if you choose to jump in this early in its early access period, which is something you may wanna do anyway because of how damn well it delivers on its core fantasy. Complete immersion into being a detective is accomplished thanks to a huge leaning on immersive sim elements.

Sure it’s got your typical vents and everyone leaves their passwords on sticky notes, but what separates Shadows of Doubt from it’s more actiony-cousins is the fact that the highly interactive immersive sim tropes are both the means and the ends. Flipping through papers and documents and obsessively scanning any contact point for fingerprints are the mechanisms that move you closer to your goals of solving whatever mystery it is you’re trying to solve, whether that’s just an attempt to ID someone and snap a picture or performing a classic murder investigation.

Your pause menu is a classic thumbtack board where the relevant topics, pictures, and the red string that links them are deliberate associations you need to make, letting you roleplay as that meme with all the straw-grasping it implies.

It works; It is a game of systems through and through. Power sources all lead back to breakers, city directories contain the names and addresses of all its residents, and computers log email conversations and spam alike. It’s tangible in that kind of way that all the best imm simms are, and it even takes it a step further by throwing some minor survival game elements in there.

Hunger, thirst, and temperature are typically pretty superfluous to manage in a game as relatively combatless as this one is, and it clicked for me pretty early on that these mechanics are here for immersions sake and not difficulties. Cozying up to the fire on a cold night and getting a drink at the bar in between chasing dead leads became these persistent rituals I would perform when getting stuck, and they had their intended effect of pulling me in just that much further and giving me the same sort of mental clearing and thinking time that my character was getting.

But a cigarette and a black coffee aren’t your only recourse when the trail gets cold; because among the many hidden benefits to Shadows of Doubt’s structure is the fact you can just go do something else. Jobs aren’t dolled out linearly, you just exist in the few blocks of generated cityscape and need to make a living and can do whatever detective jobs you want to make that happen.

In the almost-cyberpunk world you inhabit, things are just near-future enough to be reminiscent of our own world but also just-distant enough to have some sci-fi twists. For starters, the corporations that control our future have farmed out being a detective to gig workers… you just walk right into city hall and pick up a murder investigation form that demands you identify the killer but also gives you some optional bonus objectives, like identifying the murder weapon and motive.

You can head to one of the local hotspots and grab job listings off the wall for some lower stakes detectiving that’s usually just the identification of someone out in the world or the acquisition of an important item. Your fee might give you enough cash to buy a new item to help in whatever you were stuck on originally or maybe you’ll just passively stumble across relevant information because it all takes place in the same world with the same streets and the same characters.

But I think what might be Shadows of Doubts hidden virtue; it’s largest differentiating factor that helps it nail the detective fantasy so decisively… is surprisingly the procedural generation itself. I was a skeptic at first; I mean, wouldn’t these mechanics and immersive sim elements be all the better in a more crafted and authored detective campaign with actual characters? It only took me about 30 seconds into playing to realize why that’s not the case:

Because sure, while that’s no doubt a trade being made; you lose the ability to have any meaningful writing in a system like this or even a beginning, middle, and end. Without a punchy resolution you’re left to just kind of meander about the world until you’re bored or, more than likely, you solve the game by identifying the broad strokes of how its murder generation works.

But for that first 15 or so hours, what you get is a game where everyone and anyone could be the murderer. When you’re playing a more linear detective game or even following alongside your moms favorite cop and lawyer shows, what you don’t realize is all the little clues you’re accumulating by the very structure of those mediums. Things like who the named characters or what the camera is pointing at are direction and misdirection in detective experiences that are really just multiple choice tests when viewed through the lens of solving the mystery.

In comparison, Shadows of Doubt is the free form essay. It’s starting a detective journey where the suspect pool is hundreds wide, and funneling that down is as bewildering as it sounds. You’re unlikely to find any thrilling twists when during the revelation of any given murderer, but the path to that discover IS thrilling.

With a robust toolset and a responsive world that lets you use that toolset in most ways you can dream up, Shadows of Doubt creates a sublime framework for detective wish fulfillment. It takes a highly intractable immersive sim world and systems and recognizes that they’re good enough to be an entire game when done correctly, resulting in a game that’s fundamentally about its little interactable details rather than letting them be a compliment to a more traditional action focus.

Sub-par technical performance does cast a shadow over much of the experience, but the highs it delivers make it worth playing regardless… without a doubt.