Every ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ case i get has absolutely no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ clues, ♥♥♥♥ you for wasting my time.
Playing on normal btw.

Shadows of Doubt is everything I have ever wanted in a game. SoD is an incredible detective game where you actually have to do the thinking for yourself. The case board UI is incredible and so flexible in ways that allow you to pin information in your own unique way. However that's where my compliments end. It has been just over a year since this game released into Early Access and it is still riddled with bugs.

* Fingerprints still have a chance to infinitely create new fingerprint types, making it impossible to track down the killer.
* Bodies still sometimes glitch into walls or the floor
* Killers still have no true motive (everybody is a serial killer)
* Fingerprints still aren't placed in realistic locations (the same door will have 10 fingerprints for the same person. Why are there so many? And sometimes not even on the doorknob)
*Arriving too early at a crime scene will sometimes cause the AI to freak out and run around in circles.
* The AI will sometimes get permanently stuck in a loop of moving furniture or turning on and off light switches

There are also some aspects of the game that don't make sense to me at all.

* You receive a murder case from the city hall, but the police won't let you investigate. This means the police and city hall don't work together? How does the government even function?
* City Hall keeps a data base on every single person in the city. You can simply walk to a computer and get information on every single person in the city. Shouldn't this be a tightly secured area?
* Employment Contracts keep WAY too much personal info on people that it shouldn't.
* There are no jails.

just purely boring and broken and the devs don't care to listen to the complaints. (abandoned project) every npc has a gun and randomly aggros onto you for zero reason, whats the point of the enforcers? every case is a rinse and repeat of the last, super linear, easy to solve and no satisfying reward for slogging through the cases, narrative is non-existent, money is useless besides hapless designing of an apartment? why would u want to design an apartment in this? its not even persistent. you can phase through any outside walls that go above the ground floor, so escape is linear to vents unless you want to phase through walls and get shot by security. there for some reason is stat effects that add nothing but an annoyance to gameplay. you will find guns, silencers, ammo and can even buy these things and equip them but are unable to fire? what is the point of this? you're telling me to go into a game where everyone can shoot you for no consequence or reason and you can only defend yourself by throwing a barrel or punching them several hundred times. developers for this game clearly don't care and have left this game to modders, this is incredibly lazy. the ai is so bland and each and every single npc has a repeat of the exact same dialogue so there is zero variance, leading to you playing 2 hours of carefully designed gameplay/story only to be thrown into a boring, empty worthless sandbox. if anything this game is a scam.

I have no doubt that with time and effort this game will be amazing. But at the moment it's more of a gimmick than a game. I don't say that to discourage the devs btw, I really want this game to become the ultimate detective sim.

But my problem is that the procedural case's aren't very good they are TOO random there's not really much logic to them and its basically just running everywhere around the map looking for fingerprints and they are 90% of the game atm. Honestly I think the devs should add more handcrafted cases to the game. The tutorial case was the best time I had with this game.

It seems like a great game it actually is a great game but only like 40% of the time. It's so riddled with bugs it's almost unplayable, some times bodies just randomly disappear after taking their fingerprint, people don't show up where they're supposed or items, or even whole rooms don't spawn.
The whole mechanic of having an apartment is completly useless when you can't even put items in it because they're gone after loading the game.

And i get it, it's Early Acces, but it's been a year, and the same bugs that were present on release are still here.
Buy it in like 2 years when the game is at least playable.

Great idea, too buggy to play and have fun.

Hell of a cool concept but i'm sorry to say that this game doesn't work for ♥♥♥♥.

Get it on sale. Right now there are several game-breaking bugs and finishing a case is actually a rare thing (I've finished one main-mission in 15 hours) because so many things can go wrong along the way, forcing you to cancel cases hours into them, or start an entirely new game.

Currently I'm doing a murder case. I just sneaked into the apartment of the victim, checked the body, went through their files to identify them, and put together a profile on them. I also found an expended shotgun shell that matches the wounds on the body, a note from the killer, and a mysterious fingerprint on the front door that may belong to the killer, or to the police that arrived right before I did. Time will tell!

I noticed there is a camera in the lobby. So I go down to find the security room, because then I can check the cameras to see exactly who walked into the apartment at the time the victim was murdered. From there I'd just have to ask around town and track that person down. I get to the security room I see a janitor standing at the door. As I approach they begin to lock the door. "Great! They're leaving!" They lock the door to the security room, then unlock it, then walk inside, then immediately turn around and come back out, then lock the door, unlock it, walk back in and... I realize they're stuck in an infinite loop.

So I can't actually go into the security room to check the camera because the entire complex will try to fight me if I'm spotted. So I try to lure the janitor away but they go straight back to that loop as soon as the alerts disappear. Fine. I'll break some rules... I knock them out with the door, but because it's in such a high traffic area, other residents just wake them up, they catch me in the room, and start pummeling me with their fists... FINE! I'll just knock them out, check the cameras and leave,... I... why is the button to fight suddenly not working? *mash mash mash* I can't get my fists to come out so I can fight back... UGH! *ALT+F4*

Sometimes saving and reloading fixes that stuff, but in this case it didn't. And even when it does it's often only a matter of time before you run into the next one.

This is a common occurrence in this game. You will be canceling cases, restarting the game, or just regenerating brand new cities after hours of time invested because something happens where you can't continue the game. Everything is procedurally generated so your experience all depends on if you get a good roll of the dice or not, but you won't know if you did until a lot of time investment.

All of that said, there's a great game underneath all of that. It just takes a lot of luck to reach it, and then you might lose it due to the most random thing. But as someone else said, this is 100% detective work. No hand-holding. It's on you to find clues, collect evidence, build profiles, make connections with other people in the world and chip away little by little until you've built a good case and narrowed everything down to the person. It's really fun and the overall system of organization is great. But again, getting a full working experience is completely random, so I would wait for a sale or until more bugs get worked out!

I loved this game. It was very fun to solve murders, but the game is far too short and needs an insane amount of work done on it. It's got more bugs than a beehive, and it honestly ruins the experience.

So just got this game and on my first time playing mine wont even go past the first loading screen when you make a map, yes i tried all the "fixes" and waited well over 10 minutes for the game to load. I haven't been able to play and seems this issue is over a year old so i figured it would be fixed by now, and yes i do understand that it is an early access title but a bug this game breaking should have been fixed by now.