Shadows of Doubt is a voxel graphics detective game that sticks you in a sandbox, clockwork world. Every citizen has their own life and routine, everyone is named and can be a suspect or victim, and it should be amazing. You’re trying to up your social ranking so that you can flee this urban nightmare for a better life. It has the skeleton of something incredible until you realize its bones are so hollow that they’ll collapse in almost no time. This game is impossible to “spoil”, so I’ll talk about it all in this review.
Starting Up A Run
The game is entirely a sandbox adventure of procedurally generated “jobs” and a handful of crime archetypes you’ll have to solve. There is one hand-crafted murder you can solve, and it is incredible. My first few hours with the game had me enthralled, as I was part of a voxel-based clockwork city that felt alive. After solving this initial murder you’re dumped into the heart of the title, doing odd jobs to raise your social level so that you can retire to someplace better. You’re given a wide range of options on how you want your city and playthrough to be set up.
Whether you choose “The Dead of Night” hand-crafted murder or build your city in the sandbox mode you’ll start by naming the town and your character. From city size to starting money, lock pick count, and dozens of other options you can craft each playthrough to match the experience you want. It’s a decent number of options though most of them relate to various status effects being off or on. Once the long process of generating a city is done you’ll head off into the night and hope the jobs and murders you get give you a snowball’s chance in hell of completing them.
Procedural Generation At Its Best and Worst
Shadows of Doubt is played from the first-person, I only had access to PC code before launch console codes only being available post-release. It ran decently on my beefy PC, but you’ll want to check later coverage to see how it is on Xbox and PS5. The main gist of the game is that you’re in a city where every NPC has a name and daily routine. Within this maze of people and buildings, you’ll have to find jobs at local restaurants to do things such as beating someone up, throwing food in another’s face, stealing an object, and a few more. You’ll do these jobs to earn cash with which you can buy a handful of items like cameras and body armor and everything takes up a limited inventory slot.
Occasionally during these random side-jobs, a murder will happen and you can choose to try and solve it or not. There were at least 5 murder archetypes that I experienced and every job and crime to solve is a procedurally generated mix of people and places. This should lead to nearly “unlimited” replay value but I found it highly repetitive after an hour or two. There just isn’t enough variety in the crimes or jobs to make this feel like a 1.0 release on PC after a lengthy time in early access. Most of the jobs will have you find a briefcase that is either handed to you or stashed in a random location that you’ll use the in-game map to find. Once you have said briefcase you’ll use the clues it attaches to your menu-based pin-board to start working.
The board is the main mechanic in Shadows of Doubt that you’ll have to figure out if you want to have any clue on how to solve a case. The initial tutorial murder case handholds you and sets up an incorrect idea of how it works. Nothing is ever directly pinned to it outside of briefcase materials. Every time you come across a clue you need to manually choose the pin and put it on the board. This will let you easily access phone numbers to call or address that you can click on so that the game will lead you in the right direction. The pinboard is the first area I felt underwhelmed as by the time I had solved a few murders it just felt like the same thing, that is of course when the start of a case gave me enough valid info to continue.
Far too often the descriptions you’re given for an assailant or target are far too vague to have any idea who it might be in a city of 100+ people. I had multiple jobs and murder cases that gave me two main clues: “They have green eyes” and “They make x amount of money”. There was nothing else to give me any idea who this person was and even after questioning a few dozen people around the crime scene through a rudimentary UI, I had no clue who it was and had to drop the case, hoping the next one would give me something tangible to go on.
Controls worked well on a mouse and keyboard and were a bit finicky on controller, which doesn’t give me the most hope for the console versions. You’ll be doing a lot of staring at voxel people and environments as you search for clues using your tools like the fingerprint scanner. Time passes quickly and clues disappear as the days go by. If you see a job for a case that’s over a day old you might as well give up because any fingerprints, blood, or even bodies will be gone by the time you get there. It’s this incredible idea that in practice is rarely fun to execute because of how hands-off its design is.
The City
As there is no ‘campaign’ you’ll always be playing in the Sandbox Mode, which procedurally generates everything in your city by the options you’ve chosen. No matter what the only main objective is to up your social ranking to a set number and get out of there. The city is always a grid filled with similar buildings that may have different names. One constant is city hall, where you’ll have to go for case forms and equipment purchases. The layout of each building has cameras, vents, a mix of locked and unlocked doors, and more. The lock and security systems can be opened or hacked with lockpicks, which you’ll find around various environments.
You can go into any house and steal anything, as long as no one sees you. There’s a big risk/reward factor to the game, though its systems can be easy to cheese. You can pummel someone to get information and they won’t remember you did it, going into an area you’re not supposed to and someone saw you? As long as you find another way to sneak out they won’t remember it was you most of the time. Shadows of Doubt is a game of great ideas, with a major focus on choice, that invariably feels like an empty shell, devoid of purpose or variety.
The game looks great at times, using voxels and a noir art style. You have cyber punk-style upgrades that can allow you to jump out of windows from the top of a skyscraper and take no damage, though most of them have a negative side as well. The only way to upgrade your implants is to steal them out of people’s homes, and in the largest city variant, there are dozens if not hundreds of apartments to go through. During the day when most people are at their jobs you can steal to your heart’s content once you’ve disabled any alarm systems, and it’s fun for a bit. The overall lack of drive though comes through in both its quests and the city itself.
These are people with names and jobs but they all feel like the same few types. Most don’t want to talk to you unless you pay them, a few will be nice and do it no matter what if you ask for their name or address as you try to fill out details of your target or suspect. There are so many systems at play but only a few variations in them. I started and played at least 5 hours in 4+ cities and saw the same jobs, murders, and situations dozens of times. It lets down what is a cool-looking, great-sounding game. The music is excellent, with a synthy noir cyberpunk style that fits everything you’re experiencing. There’s no voice acting, and most of the dialogue is repeated every time you interact with someone.
Wrapping Things Up
Shadows of Doubt should be great. A lack of variety leads to repetition so quickly that I can’t recommend this 1.0 and console release. If the devs continue supporting the game with new content, especially something more directed like the tutorial mission, then it could potentially become an indie classic. For now, though the game is a mere shadow of its potential.
Shadows of Doubt
Played on
PC (Steam)
PROS
- Cool Look
- Great Music
- Brilliant Ideas
CONS
- Poor Execution
- Lack of variety in murders
- Job system is highly repetitive
- Dialogue repeats too often
- Jobs/Cases start with too little information to complete, often
Good to read an honest review that lets us know it’s something to keep an eye on but not there quite yet, so thanks
Have been waiting for this to hit 1.0 and consoles after reading an early PC preview a while back.
Love the ideas behind it (although I’m not a massive fan of voxel graphics to be honest I could cope) but reading the review it seems it still needs longer in the oven - may see how it develops and likely pick it up then if it makes some QoL improvements…
I thought this was a late review for that one UE5 walking simulator game with detective elements, but that’s a different one it seems.
Is that Nobody Wants to Die? Think the review is further down the forum - it’s really good
That is it!
Good review, I’ll stay away
Shame, as it seems to have potential. But the procedural stuff is very uninteresting to me.
They’ve now called this game “major content complete”, when more content is what it desperately needs. Highly disappointed, and it seems like it runs terribly on Xbox and PS5.