Is there a shadow of doubt that this is worth playing?
Shadows of Doubt is set in an alternate reality in the hyper-industrialized 1980s. Think like a detective and use a variety of gadgets as a private intelligence investigator, gathering evidence and making money by solving cases, finding and selling information and more. Play your own way in a fully simulated world with hundreds of citizens. Discover, meet and tail individual citizens, each with their own name, job, apartment and daily routine, in unique, procedurally-generated cities. Each case has different culprits, clues and experiences for you to test your investigative skills. Break into apartments, rifle through secret documents or hack security systems – even a discarded receipt can be the key to cracking a case. Trace the receipt back to an individual location, scour CCTV footage and match the time up to the receipt to find out who it belonged to!
I didn’t know what to expect with Shadows of Doubt, but it definitely wasn’t what I imagined when I loaded it up. It’s a first-person detective game set in procedural cities with procedural cases, so you’ll never run out of things to do. As a detective you don’t have the full support of the police, so breaking into buildings for evidence or arriving at a crime scene will have them pursue you if found.
The case board allows you to piece together all the evidence to submit to the authorities, but you also get bonuses for specific things like arresting the perp and providing enough proof, such as a murder weapon, finger prints or evidence that they were the last to be seen with a victim. It can be a little overwhelming when you have so many pieces of evidence on the board, but you choose what goes on it, so only keep the relevant clues.
You also get plenty of gadgets like a fingerprint scanner, codebreaker and can also implant upgrades that can have positive/negative effects. You can play the game as a sandbox mode with it customised to your will or take on the Dead of Night mission which acts more of a tutorial to how the game works. I would recommend doing the latter first to get your bearings and then try a sandbox mode with your own settings.
The possibilities are simply endless here, which is why it is frustrating to say that the game suffers from a number of technical issues at present. It can take an incredibly long time to generate a city or even load up a save, with some cases it getting stuck loading when generating. The framerate is a bit over the place and inputting numbers in a keypad suffers a glitch where it clears what you’ve entered, which is no fun when you are dialling a phone number…
When it works, it works very well and I have high hopes for it. It’s only just come out of Early Access and to consoles, so I know it’s still got quite a way to go to reach the final product they mean to deliver. I have to admit I was a bit shocked with the load times for a Series X game, but hopefully they can find a way to speed that up over time. The visuals are Minecraft-esque but the noir setting is brilliantly done.
The Verdict
Shadows of Doubt is a unique detective game. If it can just get the necessary updates to fix its performance issues and number of glitches, it has the potential to be brilliant.