Shadows of Doubt: A detailed review

[Psyringe]

First off, I apologize for posting a review here in the forum. I usually don't like that, because reviews do have their own dedicated space. However, Steam reviews unfortunately have a character limit, and this particular review happens to exceed it. I didn't want to delete parts, so I'm posting it here for anyone who stumbles upon it in the review section (see here), and wants to read the full thing. Hope that's okay.

Comments are of course always welcome. :)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Shadows of Doubt" is a unique "private investigator" game set in a procedurally generated city with hundreds of fully simulated citizens. It is extremely promising, but also still in a very rough state.

1. Story & Setting

You play a sort-of private investigator in an "alternate reality" 80s cyberpunk setting where corporations are controlling the world and where people can upgrade their skills by installing certain software in their brains or bodies. The setting explains the lack of modern technology (like cell phones, or the Internet), which makes investigations more interesting, and also explains why the game's world is more grim than the one we're used to.

The game doesn't really tell a story (or stories), and that is one of the weaker elements of its current design (but read on). Your character is mostly a blank slate with the only goal of earning enough money to afford retirement, and even the murder cases that you take on hardly have any coherent plot. You rarely find a motive, the game seems to just randomly pick a killer who then starts murdering people, and tasks you to find the culprit via the evidence that's available. Sometimes you can guess a motive or make one up in your mind, the game does provide plenty of hooks for doing so - but the motive never plays any role in the investigation. You can't question suspects or witnesses about specific topics or pieces of evidence either, the conversation system is very barebones. But if you have an imaginative mind, you can definitely spin your own stories based on the information that the game feeds you, and some players are writing amazing after-action reports about their cases. Lots of very interesting situations can emerge in this dynamically simulated world, but it's your mind doing the storytelling, not the game itself.

2. Gameplay & Mechanics

The mechanics are the part where the game's uniqueness and ingenuity really shine. They are slightly different for the two activities that are available to you (solving murder cases, and doing side jobs), so I'll explain both.

Murder cases begin with you being given the location of the crime site. You can then go there and investigate the scene. There is a huge amount of information that can be checked and may be relevant - from fingerprints to phonecalls to security camera footage to receipts in the trash to personal or professional relationships to bootprints to items left on the scene, and more. The game doesn't hold your hand, it's on you to find the evidence and to deduce which details are important, and which lead may be worth following. This creates a very immersive experience that really makes you feel like a private investigator trying to crack a case, not like a video game character retracing the steps that a developer has laid out for you.

The second gameplay element that contributes massively to the player's immersion, is the amount of detail to which the world is simulated. For example, a citizen that gets selected as the killer may not own a weapon. So before they commit their first murder, they might buy a pistol in a pawn shop. This purchase gets tracked in the sales ledger of the pawn shop. So if the player (after the murder) finds 8mm bullet casings at the crime scene, they can check the city's stores for records of people who have recently bought a weapon that uses such ammunition. The simulation is so detailed that you can even - if you happen to be in the same building and on the same floor as the victim's apartment - see the killer leave and get their identity right there.

It's noteworthy though that due to the large amount of available data and the game's abstinence from guiding you, it is very possible that a lead that you decided to follow turns out to be a dead end. You'll also have to do a substantial amount of legwork - for example, if you believe that the killer might be one of the victim's friends or colleagues, then you may have to investigate 15 different people (14 of which being innocent) until you find the one detail that reveals the killer. Personally I like this aspect, as it contributes to my immersion. Real detectives have to do this kind of legwork too, games usually just don't cover it because they focus on more overtly "exciting" stuff. This game gives you the full blast of the deduction work and legwork that needs to be done to solve tricky cases, and I like that a lot. But you'll have to decide for yourself if that's your cup of tea as well, or if you prefer other games that "protect" you from potentially spending large amounts of time investigating insignificant details.

While the game doesn't guide you, it makes it relatively easy to track and order all the information that you're finding. At any time, you can access your "case board", where you can pin any evidence that you find, and link pieces together with lines of different colors. You can also type a few words for each such line. The game will add obvious connections by itself - for example, if you pin both the victim and their address to the case board, then the game will automatically draw a connection between them. You can move pinned information freely, the connections will stay intact. You can also add sticky notes with any text you want, which can be useful to make personal notes about the case. A game that makes so much information available to the player definitely needs an efficient and customizable way to organize it all, and "Shadows of Doubt" delivers in that regard.

Let's discuss "side jobs" next. These are similar to murder cases, but differ in two aspects: One, you get fewer details to work with, and sometimes just very vague information like "The target is 38 years old, and their partner works as an accountant in an office building at this address". So in order to find your target, you have to go through the employee data of all offices in that building, identify their accountants, and then visit those in order to find out the age of their partners. This can be very engaging (personally I really like the challenge of finding the most efficient way of tackling a seemingly impossible task, and it feels very rewarding for me to eventually complete it), but once again, this won't be everybody's cup of tea.

The second difference between side jobs and murder cases is that side jobs aren't necessarily about arresting someone. You may be tasked to steal a specific item from your mark, to humiliate them publicly, to vandalize their apartment, and more. This also shows that (in true "gumshoe detective" fashion) you're not expected to do everything above board. But all of these side jobs are optional, and there are dozens of them available at any given time. You can choose not to take any that you don't want, and you can abandon any job without any punishment.

The game also provides a progression mechanic via the cyberpunk-style upgrades that you can install. You can install 18 of those, and there are mutually exclusive decisions to make. Some of the upgrades are very useful, others are merely convenient, and some are pretty worthless.

Finally, you have your own apartment in the city, which you can decorate, and you can also relocate to a different apartment. Currently, the decoration aspect is very buggy, so I can't say much about it.

3. Graphics & Presentation

The game uses Minecraft-style voxel graphics. Personally I find this graphical style very ugly, but if it helps to make a game like this possible, then I don't mind - I'm not playing this game for the looks. A small development team like this one has to pick priorities, and this game's focus is clearly on the mechanics, not on the presentation.

Sound effects and music feel okay - nothing sticks out as especially good or bad. There is no voice-acting, and given that a lot of the content is procedurally generated and a huge amount of different details can be relevant, that's probably for the better.

4. Usability & Accessibility

While many indie games (and even some triple-A titles) only provide minimal settings and customizability, this game takes great care to provide a good user experience.

Graphics settings include the usual selectors for display mode and resolution, also a frame rate cap and a vsync toggle, several different anti-aliasing modes, and an FOV slider, which many players will appreciate. Potentially undesired features like motion blur, depth of field, film grain, dithering, bloom, and color grading can all be toggled individually. Nine different volume sliders give you a lot of options to fine-tune your acoustic experience.

All keys (including movement keys) can be fully rebound, which is an important feature that many games sadly overlook. Both mouse axes can be inverted separately.

There are also many options that let you tweak the gameplay to your liking. You can make the start of the game easier or harder by changing the amount of money and lockpicks that you have, you can start homeless or with an apartment, and you can switch any of the game's 16 status effects off individually if you don't like them. Several settings address the amount of helpful information that you're getting, such as hints about the game's controls, objective markers, whether you see an arrow pointing to a destination that you set on the map, or whether you'll see icons indicating how aware bystanders are of illegal actions you might be performing.

The game can be saved manually at any point in time, and I did not notice a limit to the number of save slots.

I'm really impressed by the amount of care and effort that has gone into the game's options, it puts many triple-A titles to shame in this regard. The only thing missing are dedicated accessibility options like filters for colorblind players, or directional sound indicators for deaf players.

5. State of Early Access

While I'm generally very positive about this game, here comes the big caveat: It definitely requires more content (currently there is only one somewhat elaborate case in the game, which is the tutorial case, everything else is much simpler in its structure), many of its features require balancing and/or tuning, and the game is currently full of bugs.

As an example, I keep falling through the floor (not frequently, but it keeps happening), some jobs cannot be completed because the game "forgets" your current stage of the quest, some murder cases are unduly hard to solve because crucial evidence glitches out and can't be accessed by the player, NPCs can get stuck and are then incapable of following their schedules, some stores and offices stop being worked at all after some time, the footage of some security cameras can never be accessed because the building was generated without a camera control room, the procedural generation can create overlapping objects that makes some of them unusable, reloading a save can irrecoverably break certain jobs, items and furniture in your apartment may suddenly vanish without a trace, sometimes the clues you get are so vague that several people match the description and you can't logically deduce who your target is, and so on.

Personally I am enjoying the game despite these flaws, and I can say that the game never crashed on me and that I didn't encounter any showstopper bugs myself (usually you can just abandon a bugged job and do another one). But good golly is it rough sometimes.

For an Early Access game, this is not necessarily a problem. The developers are very responsive in the forum and seem highly motivated to fix the bugs and polish their game. What makes me worried, though, is that the product page states an expected Early Access time of only six months. I am highly skeptical that all these bugs can be addressed, and the remaining planned content can be added, by this small team of developers within that short timeframe.

On top of that, there are additions that the game would immensely benefit from, but I'm not sure if they are currently even part of the design plan. Examples are a believable implementation of motives, killers that at least try to conceal their tracks (currently every killer leaves at least one fingerprint at the scene), a much more detailed conversation system with a way to question people about specific topics (pieces of evidence, people, personal information, etc.), or deliberately placed/generated red herrings that make cases more challenging. I'm pretty sure that these would require more than six months to implement even if there weren't tons of bugs to fix.

My hope is that the developers realize what a gem they have in their hands here, and continue to work on it to bring it to its full potential.

6. Conclusion

I do recommend this game to players who like the idea of playing a "gumshoe" private investigator. Its implementations of how the murders take place dynamically, how every citizen and their actions are fully simulated and how this automatically creates leads and evidence, how the player has lots of different ways to find information and pursue leads, and how the case board helps organize all the information, are already better than anything else that I've seen in this regard in 45 years of being a gamer.

However, I have to be honest here and acknowledge that the current state of the game also has lots of issues. And while the developers seem highly motivated and have already worked on this game for years, there's no _guarantee_ that they are capable of addressing its many problems, or that they won't get overwhelmed and the project eventually collapses under its own weight. I'm optimistic myself, but I have to acknowledge the risk.

What I can say, is that for me, the game definitely was already worth the money I spent on it.

[cranis2]

Thank you.