I’m a big fan of detective stories in any format; books, films and television shows. Despite this, I’ve struggled to form a connection with detective games outside of L.A. Noire, The Case of the Golden Idol and the Return of the Obra Dinn due to one crucial error that so many games within this genre make: handholding.
People who love detective stories do so because they enjoy the thrill of attempting to deduce the case themselves before the final reveal; coming up with their own theories and debating these with others who are following the same story. As a result, the best kind of detective game doesn’t lead you through the case, but instead presents you with the evidence and leaves it up to you to work out.
ColePowered Games’ Shadows of Doubt takes this concept on board. Launching into Early Access in a few days, Shadows of Doubt is a sandbox stealth game set in a sci-fi noir city in an alternative, heavily industrialised 1980s. You are a broke private investigator who must take on side jobs while also solving murder cases in order to pay your way, climb up the social ladder, and eventually achieve the lifelong goal of having enough social credit to be invited to ‘The Fields’ retirement district.
Saying I was ‘excited’ for Shadows of Doubt is an understatement; this game is a dream come true. It’s all I’ve ever wanted in a detective game – a futuristic, dark and noir setting and complete free will to use my own brains to solve the case.
In its Early Access state, Shadows of Doubt is very unfinished, but the foundations are there and ready for something truly promising and I can’t wait to see what’s to come in terms of added content in the full release.
As a sandbox game, murder cases are procedurally generated, as is the world you play in. You can adjust the size of this world, as well as the game’s difficulty and length which will affect how often murder cases will appear so that you can reach retirement sooner.
To adjust to the mechanics of Shadows of Doubt, ColePowered Games have made a specially crafted murder case called ‘The Dead of Night’ which acts as a tutorial. The only problem is that The Dead of Night sets high standards for the rest of the game which Shadows of Doubt just can’t live up to with its procedurally generated cases, but I’ll get to that later.
Even more unusual are the survival aspects of Shadows of Doubt, which I really wasn’t expecting, but I can understand that these have been implemented to put further need into generating a steady income. As well as hunger, thirst, general health and tiredness, you’ll need to manage status effects – even making sure you don’t run indoors after coming in from the rain as you’ll slip!
While this does add urgency to gathering income and also prompts you to invest in the side quests rather than hanging around for the more exciting murder investigations, all it really did for me was turn my private investigator character into a real scumbag who would steal valuables from crime scenes and also scoff their food and drink while taking fingerprint readings. “Hmm yes, from the blood splatter it would appear the cause of death was from a sharp object… oooh, is that a ham sandwich?” I even went to the lengths of knocking on neighbour’s doors to ask if I could search their apartment just so I could take a nap in their bed when my character was exhausted.
Another prompt to build your income is the apartment system. You can buy and decorate your own apartment in Shadows of Doubt which I had a lot of fun with. In fact, reaching retirement wasn’t even an interest for me; I just wanted to design a gorgeous home. The apartment design system is also well put together; you’re able to move furniture where you want and even choose the materials and colour of the walls and flooring.
Let’s start from the beginning. If you opt to play The Dead of Night case, you’ll begin Shadows of Doubt in the apartment that you once shared with your partner, who you’ll find has now left you and recently sent you an email to remind you to stay on top of your bills. In this fun introduction to Shadows of Doubt’s mechanics, you’ll learn how to pick locks using the bobby pins and paperclips than you can collect in the world, how to search areas for passcodes to computers and safes, and also how to use the City Directory to search up the addresses of every person in the city. More importantly, I spent the first half hour of this game turning on every light and tap in the apartment, throwing toilet roll everywhere, and knocking on my elderly neighbour’s door before throwing a pillow in her face and running away. It’s safe to say that Shadow of Doubt’s controls are very fun, though I’m not sure how throwing objects is supposed to be used in the game.
You will first go to the city hall and pick up a case form. In order to solve a case, you must be able to fill out the required information to have them arrested. You need to name the killer, where they live, have located the murder weapon, and state the evidence that pins the named killer at the crime scene. For extra cash, you can perform a citizen arrest on the suspect if you have a pair of handcuffs in your inventory. However, people will only remain handcuffed for two hours.
When entering a crime scene, you are doing so without police jurisdiction as you are only a private investigator. Because of this, you are trespassing if you enter any private area without permission. This can be residential areas or commercial ones. You can usually get permission to search these by speaking to people, though every time I did so, they always wanted monetary compensation for you entering the area.
Alternatively, you can sneak in, which is where Shadows of Doubt’s stealth aspects come into play. Buildings will be armed with cameras, which you’ll have to sneak by and shut off otherwise they will sound an alarm. You can do this by staying hidden behind objects, or by turning off the lights while walking around. You can then either find the box to temporarily deactivate the camera or turn off the alarm which can be located by following the red wiring leading away from the camera that’s in your way. You can pick locks to enter locked areas, or climb through vents to get inside. However, if you’re caught performing these actions then whoever has spotted you will either attack or sound an alarm.
If you’re caught, a fight could ensue. While you swore off guns years ago, you can use your fists to block and throw out attacks. Though be warned because some citizens may be carrying firearms and if the enforcers get involve, they will be heavily armed.
Once you’ve managed to access the crime scene alive, it is now time to search the place for clues. Your first point of action (aside from looting the fridge) will be to locate the body. You can observe the body for the cause of death, time of death and also anything else they may have been carrying on them at the time of death.
You can then use a fingerprint scanner to note all fingerprints on the scene, these can then be compared to personal records so that you can identify whose fingerprints are present (which usually pinpoints you to the killer, but we’ll get to that later). If there are footprints available at the scene, these can also be scanned to find out what size they are, and compare this to the size of the shoes available in the apartment to determine whether they are the victim’s or not.
You can go through the victim’s apartment to find their work ID to determine their place of work, any emails or letters which may signal where they have recently gone, and go through their phone records to track down the number of the last caller. Once you’re done tampering with the crime scene, assaulting the victim’s neighbours and causing havoc in the streets by throwing bins at people, it’s time to hand in the case form and earn your cheque.
All of this evidence can be pinned onto your case board – which you have full control over. The player decides what evidence is relevant to the case and can organise this menu how they want by rearranging the evidence, drawing string between links, and even writing their own notes. This menu is incredibly intuitive and helpful for each case. Unfortunately, Shadows of Doubt has a bit of trouble with glitches in its menus, but hopefully these will be patched later on. Sometimes you will go into them and they just won’t work and you’ll need to keep closing and opening them until they start behaving.
In fact, Shadows of Doubt has its fair share of glitches in almost all aspects of its gameplay. NPCs will sink into the floors, walls or furniture, the player will often morph through walls, floors or furniture, and I also found that the interrogation mechanic just didn’t work at all for me as I was unable to ask arrested citizens any questions at all.
You have a map to get around, unfortunately it’s very poorly designed. For one, you can’t zoom in or out of it. So, if you’re travelling to a newly discovered place that you aren’t able to flag up in your case board, then you’ll have to wander around the streets until you come across the right building – which is very difficult if you’ve picked a large world. If you do have a location marked as evidence, for example you found an address of a suspect in their personal information, the game will automatically route you to this. You also can’t put down custom markers; so I just made custom cases with the locations I wanted to remember listed as evidence. Another thing that I found irksome was the lack of objectives. Yes, there’s no hand-holding. But this also means when a murder happens, you have seconds to read and remember the location of the crime scene before it disappears from the screen forever otherwise you will not be able to find it (unless it turns up in a newspaper). Overall, the navigation system is just a complete mess.
There are other relatively easy quality of life improvements that Shadows of Doubt really needs. For one, it would be handy to actually have status bars for the survival aspects other than just knowing when your character is hungry but not how hungry. Walking is also painfully slow for some reason, so I ended up just running everywhere. But my biggest quality of life irk is definitely the passing time system. To pass time, you can go to sleep or sit somewhere and set a time on your watch to wait until. This is a handy mechanic if your waiting to question someone and you know their work hours and when they’ll be at work. The only thing is that the game doesn’t pass time quickly, it just speeds up the seconds a bit, so you’re still waiting around which makes this mechanic pretty redundant. To make this part of the game even more frustrating is the auto pause. After around 30 seconds to a minute, the game will automatically pause for some reason. So, if you’re waiting for time to pass and decide to grab a drink or go to the bathroom while the game slowly ticks through the hours, it will automatically pause if you’re idle for too long. Why? I have no idea.
But these are things that can always be patched later on. Unfortunately, Shadows of Doubt has one major problem which may not be so easy to fix.
Shadows of Doubt has a fantastic idea, and it has the perfect foundations for this. It just needs layers. In its current state, the game gets repetitive after only three cases. This is because each case is procedurally generated rather than being written by a team of creative writers, so they are very basic. After the tutorial case, I found that each murder investigation is just a simple case of identifying the fingerprints. There’s no story to follow, no motive behind the murder. In The Dead of Night, we could go through the culprit’s emails and find that they were hired to murder the victim. However, in the rest of the game there is nothing like this. Nor is there any form of letters about meeting somewhere. The NPCs have relationships, but they’re all the same. All couples have the same emails from their partner asking them to pick up milk on the way home, the same poems hidden in their bedside drawer, and the same notes left behind reminding them of the passcodes to their computer or safe. Every case quickly becomes the same and I really hope this problem is fixed in Shadows of Doubt‘s full release because it has so much potential.
Visually, Shadows of Doubt is stunning. It uses pixelated graphics but with gorgeous shadows and colouring to make this world seem vivid and eye-catching. To match this is an ambient soundtrack which really sets the scene of this alternative world. I also enjoyed the background sound effects used for the street scenes, bars and the noises of the apartments around you while you traverse through a residential building.
Shadows of Doubt is everything I’ve ever dreamed of in a detective game. Unfortunately, its procedurally generated cases exchange well-written stories for randomised events, but there’s not enough layers for this game to remain interesting after a couple of cases in its Early Access state. I only hope that much more content is added later on to fully bring this vision to life.
Jess played Shadows of Doubt on PC in Early Access.
