Shadows of Doubt 2023 detective game

Shadows of Doubt (2023, United Kingdom)

Shadows of Doubt is an open-world detective game with a first-person perspective. As a private investigator, you are given procedurally generated cases around the city (well, part of the city), which might vary from murders to vandalism (but mostly murders). You have a variety of tools to help you on the way - from something as simple as phone directories to special equipment that will allow you to pick the locks, disable electronic surveillance or analyse the fingerprints.

You can gather pieces of evidence, like CCTV recordings, fingerprints, documents that you will find around the places, not to mention you can pretty much break into any apartment in the given area. And because all of this is randomly generated, you can stumble upon people wandering in the streets, stay at homes, sit in the restaurants, with habits assigned to each of them. This gives the game the immersive feeling, but also makes your job a bit more complicated - not everything you stumble upon will have anything to do with your investigation.

The Minecraft-like graphics allow the game to be randomly generated, but also gives it a unique outlook, but at the same time it could be tricky sometimes to determine what it is that you are looking at. All the details that you gather are available in a way of an evidence wall, where you can pin all of them and mark the links between them. The final bit is filing a report to the police, which should contain details of the culprit and evidence that you have found.

Shadows of Doubt is a mix of detective gameplay, some stealth elements, some fight elements, a lot of digging in places, where you should not dig, like someone’s drawers or backroom of a business. Some of those elements work quite well, some of them are a bit wonky, some could be boring and repetitive very quickly, so it is hard to describe the whole project in just few words.

Of course, some of the procedurally generated elements may fail (sometimes in a way that you won’t be able to finish your job), but still the scale of the project is impressive, and the gameplay is unique. It is not what you will find in a typical detective game (like constantly breaking in and working around security systems), it still can be quite clunky, but is it an innovation in the genre.

And there is one more layer to the whole project that is a bit... let’s say questionable - the logic behind the whole world is slightly puzzling. You are a private investigator, but you are sort-of contractor to the agency doing the investigation or the city itself (it is not really explained). You will get money for solving the case, but at the same time you are not allowed to enter the crime scene you need to examine in order to solve the case... And the people who will stop you from entering the crime scene are... the agency who is hiring you? The is not really explained either. Or to put it in a different way, you are forced to commit crimes (break-ins, stealing) in order to solve other crimes. And the keyword is forced, because there is no way around that bit of gameplay.

Can you solve a case like this?

TRY IT YOURSELF ❱