https://store.steampowered.com/app/986130/Shadows_of_Doubt/It was just before dawn when I heard the familiar click and static of my bootleg enforcer radio picking up the signal of another terrible advancement in my livelihood. Male, late thirties, found in his apartment with a parting note scrawled on the wall in the victim's blood: "Put a pin in it". I mulled over the implications of that message as my own pins and needles burrowed greedily into my brain, the taste of yesterday's synth-whiskey still a little too fresh in my mouth. Putting on my coat, I stepped out onto the chilly streets of New Boston as the skies opened up with their first warning shots of rain. Whoever this poor bastard had been, it looked like someone upstairs was already weeping for him...Shadows of Doubt is a procedural cyber-noir sandbox immersive sim, where you take on the role of a private investigator living in an urban center set in the dystopian corpo future of 1979. With the privately-owned police force being unequipped and uninterested in handling crimes that don't affect their shareholders, it's up to you to get to the bottom of these killings and try to bring some justice into a world that seems intent on forgetting what that looks like.
Explore a procedurally-generated city where hundreds of simulated citizens live out their lives and go through daily routines where they work, sleep, go to diners or just spend some quiet time at home with a beer and some TV.
Hunt down a variety of killers that have different methods, targets and calling cards using the best tools available to you, including: A fingerprint scanner, a very flexible interpretation of "trespassing", and an endless supply of yarn and thumbtacks that will be invaluable in helping you piece the case together.
Track down leads by tracing phone calls, questioning passersby, hacking into CCTV footage, and checking sales ledgers of weapons dealers (and much more!) to narrow down whodunnit and put them behind bars.
Work your way through murder cases to earn cash and social credit, or take on some less-than-legal side jobs for the local citizenry to pad your pockets even more and set your sights on one of the spacious Echelon apartments up in the top floors of the residential blocks. You know, the ones that don't have so many cockroaches already living in them... Who knows, maybe one day you'll earn enough social standing to get yourself an invitation to the illustrious retirement suburbs known as The Fields!
So, yeah. Pitch aside, I picked this thing up last week and have been enthralled both by the very enjoyable current state, as well as the absolutely staggering potential of this little project. It's still very much an early access title, so evidence that
would have been very helpful will occasionally spawn inside of other objects/walls, the door numbers in some buildings will sometimes be written the wrong way around, and you'll sometimes trip and fall through a crack in the sidewalk into the infinite void beneath... Also, performance is generally not that super, at least on larger map sizes where it's trying to process the day-to-day of 6-700+ individual NPCs. Still though, considering what it's actually doing behind the scenes... I'm amazed it runs as well as it does.
The game is pretty much fully procedural. Map generation will create a city with random layouts, building/business names, citizens... And some of those citizens hide a deadly secret. Is it a furious coworker, an obsessed stalker, or perhaps a deranged madman intent on snuffing out the younger generation? It's up to you to find out based on the clues they leave behind, and there are a number of ways to go about interpreting and uncovering those clues.
And if a particular murder case has you absolutely stonewall stumped, don't worry! With no one to stop them, they'll go mad from their first taste of blood and keep slaughtering citizens until they're finally caught... Maybe they'll slip up and leave more clues at the next crime scene!
The game also features some basic survival mechanics in the form of keeping yourself fed and watered enough that you'll bounce back after having your teeth punched in by an uncooperative suspect. Upgrade your character via techno-genetic sync disks which provide permanent (until uninstalled) boosts to a variety of stats and abilities, allowing you to do things like keep security systems down for longer when you knock out their secure circuit, or negating fall damage, or even getting a little monetary deposit into your account every time you suggest to a witness that they should grab a refreshingly fizzy can of Starch-Kola™
you corporate shill! Heck, there's even a disk that lets you change the height of your character, either up or down. At max height you can just reach up to mess with security cams or air vents on the ceiling without having to bring your steppy-stool out, but this comes with the downside of needing to duck every time you walk through a doorway...
There's currently a somewhat limited variety of killers, and once you properly get into the swing of things solving cases gets pretty easy with the tools and allowances available. But it's a dedicated and talented team working on the project, and it's clear that they have bright and exciting plans for the future.
The game comes with two modes: Dead of Night and Sandbox. Dead of Night starts the player out in a specially designed scenario that serves as a tutorial to introduce them to many of the game's mechanics and systems. Once that scenario is completed, the game just continues normally as a sandbox again. If you're keen on trying this thing out, I highly recommend going through the scenario even in its somewhat rough state... The pre-packaged map works fine for this, but so does any map you decide to generate afterwards (I recommend Medium or smaller for your first go). Also... Save often! It is, as mentioned, a bit rough around the edges at times, and the basement cockroaches aren't the only bugs you'll see.
I've really never encountered anything like this game before, and it's honestly a concept I never thought I'd see anyone put together... But it really, truly is a sleuthing sim sandbox, and with a bunch of Bladerunner-esque cybernoir oozing out of the seams to boot.