Yesterday, I wrote about loving to click in-game buttons and mentioned another game with lots of buttons, early access detective sim Shadows of Doubt. It’s full of buttons! It’s also full of a ton of other cool stuff that is very much up my alley, even if I am maybe its noir city’s worst detective.
You play as a detective in a dystopian city who seems to be on the outs from the police force, working your way up from nothing by solving the city’s crimes. There are side jobs you can find, but the meat and potatoes of the game is solving procedurally-generated murders, doing all the classic detective stuff: examining bodies, scanning for fingerprints, interviewing suspects, breaking into places. There’s a board with red strings you can use to keep track of everything, and when you think you have enough information to identify the killer, you turn your findings over to city hall and, if you got it right, collect your reward.
Basic stuff, except it’s also not: Shadows of Doubt is complicated as hell. There’s a tutorial that teaches you the fundamentals, but this game absolutely does not hold your hand. Even in the tutorial, you’ll find a victim’s work ID and a scrap of paper with someone’s name in the trash, and then you’re basically on your own, set loose in a rainy, procedurally-generated city to sort the whole thing out yourself, using the tools and logic you’d use in the real world. Need to find that office? Use a phone book to look up its address. Call the person who last called your victim? They’ll likely tell you to get stuffed. Got some random fingerprints? In the absence of a better idea, I like to just scan every workplace photograph in the city to see if I get a match. You have to figure out what’s a clue and what’s just noise, and then figure out how all those clues fit together. You’ll have no idea where to start, or you’ll go down total dead ends. You’ll stare at your mess of red strings and notecards knowing that you know a lot, but having no idea if or how it fits together, and meanwhile your killer’s just struck again and now you have a new mountain of clues or not-clues to add.
In my latest playthrough, I found a receipt putting the victim at a diner, but after I bribed an employee to let me look through the security footage, I found the victim had been there alone–wasted time. I followed another lead to break into an apartment, where I found fingerprints matching some I’d found at the crime scene– I was on the right track, but that didn’t make them the killer. Plus, two people seemed to live there–who was who? The apartment was crawling with security cameras I didn’t want to trip, keeping me from digging through every drawer and computer for clues.
I waited around until one of the apartment’s residents came home. When they wouldn’t tell me anything, nor accept a bribe to let me back in, I had the very clever idea to sit around outside the apartment until they’d leave for work, according to a schedule I’d found on their fridge. Except I got the day mixed up, or the person mixed up, and when I broke into the apartment they were still there. Luckily, their presence meant the security system was off, so I punched them unconscious and ransacked the rest of the apartment, pausing occasionally to punch them unconscious again when they woke up, getting badly hurt myself in the process. Eventually, I found an email proving my suspect was a hired killer sent after the victim. Excited to have a name and a motive, and eager to break the cycle of punching and rummaging, I raced from the apartment to turn in my findings without bothering to verify whether the person I’d punched was my killer, or if it was their as-yet-unseen roommate. I got the suspect right, but without bringing evidence putting them at the crime scene (I’d never matched the prints) or a solid ID of the weapon. I solved the case, but barely, and that was one of the more successful ones I’ve done.
Shadows of Doubt can be a lot. The procedural generation means a case’s storyline doesn’t follow the logic that a scripted mystery would–it would make complete sense that the killer is the victim’s ex, only for it to be basically some random coworker instead. It can be hard to know where you went wrong, if you’re following the wrong person or just haven’t found enough clues. My case board regularly gets completely out of hand, a useless tangle of strings and cards and notes as I drown myself in my own theories. Sometimes this is fun–I really feel like I’m roleplaying a shitty detective–but other times I’ll start a new run just to extricate myself from my own brain. I’m hoping the game figures out how to strike a better balance as early access continues, or just that I’ll get better the longer I stick with it.
But even when I’m totally at my wit’s end, it’s so much fun to exist in Shadows of Doubt’s world. As I said above, it’s full of clicky buttons: lights to turn on, emails to print, elevators to call, a watch alarm to set. There’s vents to hide in, cameras to hack, and cyber-modification upgrades like my favorite stealth games–in one run, I installed a mod that gave me a ton of much-needed money but at the price of getting me addicted to the (bear with me) soda made by the company that is also the President, which gave me the shakes until I paid more than it gave me to uninstall it. Beyond cyberpunk stealth stuff, there’s also a ton of survival mechanics from my other favorite genre–you get cold, hungry, injured, and even smelly, necessitating heading back to your apartment (if you can afford one!) to take a shower. When a case is driving me too bonkers, I take a break just to roleplay around the game’s world, wandering the streets and spending the night at diners, talking to strangers and pawning stolen items in hopes of affording the tools I need to crack that next big case.
In some ways, it’s a tough game to recommend–I find myself frustrated slightly more than I’d like–but then my character slips while running on a wet floor because, duh, it’s wet, or I have a flash of insight and know where to go for my next clue, and I’m having a blast all over again.
