I found Emily in the basement of Etheridge Heights, a squat tenement on the edge of town, overlooking the water. She was a mess—hands tied, bare knees pressed into the cement. I looked worse. My hunt kicked off when I found the ransom note in her flat: Leave 4,000 credits under the bridge by 9:15 pm or she dies. By then it was already 4 in the afternoon.
Since then I’d been everywhere, sprinting from one end of town to the other over and over and over. Collecting fingerprints, taking statements, rooting through trash and smashing down doors. I was a wheezing, bleeding mess, starving and stinking. But my perseverance paid off. Cross-referencing a suspicious email in Emily’s inbox with her address book and the government database of citizens gave me a suspect, and I lucked out when a local convenience store clerk had seen my perp lurking around the building.
It was a banner day until I snapped on the cuffs, sneaking up behind our kidnapper as he made his way home and wrestling him to the ground. I could already see the headlines: ‘HERO GUMSHOE NABS SNATCHER’.
My fellow citizens didn’t quite have that context, though. All they saw was a weird, un-uniformed scuzzball tackling an honest citizen without provocation. They were on me in seconds with bats and guns. One minute I was making an arrest, the next I was breathing through tubes in a hospital bed. Better luck next time.
Police procedural
Shadows of Doubt is a procgen immersive sim that’s part Deus Ex, part Chinatown, and it’s finally hit 1.0 after a promising year and a half in early access. It’s a love letter both to noir crime fiction and any videogame that’s ever had an 0451 code in it: Its voxelized cities are shrouded in darkness even at midday, and every building is connected by a network of traversable air ducts the game spins up when you load in.
You play a PI, a private dick with no money, no flex, and a police scanner, picking up murders and kidnappings the corrupt local cops won’t solve and piecing them together yourself for cash and “social credit”—a gamified class system that confers perks and privileges on a rarefied few as they ascend the ladder. Climb high enough and you can retire to The Fields, a bucolic hinterland where the city’s best and brightest can adjourn to at the end of a life well-lived, but where no one ever seems to write back from.
But really, why retire? Your city, which you generate at the start of the game and which can be anywhere from a few buildings to a sprawling block filled with 600-or-so people, never stops being a pleasure to live in. Shadows of Doubt gets a lot of things right, but I don’t think I loved anything more than I loved the experience of just wandering its streets, flats, and hallways. This is a game which knows vibe, from the rain hammering on the glass of an eerily silent apartment to the tannoys blaring ads in the streets to the discomfiting whirr of a security camera in an unlit room. It knows exactly when to spin up its sparse, synthy soundtrack and when to let diegetic sound (or its absence) do the talking.
Excellent news in any game, of course, but especially for an immersive sim. We might define these games by their (variability of) approach, but all the true greats are just as much about their locations as what you can do in them. Carnaca in Dishonored 2, Prague in Mankind Divided, Talos 1 in Prey: They all had the sense of place necessary to make you want to explore them, to dig into every nook and cranny, and to linger in your mind long after you left. Shadows of Doubt manages to do the same despite having—I can only assume—far fewer resources. It’s truly impressive.
But it does fall short of those other places in some ways, of course. How could it not? Where Arkane and co have entire teams of writers and designers to handcraft narratives and sprinkle them purposefully around the map, Shadows of Doubt is an indie game that depends on its procgen systems and pre-made narrative scaffolding to generate stories.
On the one hand, that means the game will sometimes hand you procedural side gigs (but never, in my experience, the main fare of murders and the like) you can’t reasonably solve. I took numerous gigs that would tell me to hunt someone down based only on details like their shoe size and blood type. Unless I wanted to break into the homes of all 300+ people in the city and scan their shoes (and then cross-reference it with the citizen database to check their blood), I didn’t have much choice but to abandon the case. That’s less of a complaint than it sounds: You just ditch the case—which incurs no penalty—and pick up another, but it happens often enough that it can get tedious.
On the other hand, it means you encounter a lot of the same props over and over again. You’ll find the same “Watch your back, rat!” note in multiple murder scenes. Take a side job (available on cork boards in bars and restaurants for you to pick up between murders and kidnappings) to investigate a spouse’s infidelity and you’ll find that their love letters to their paramour read identically to those of the last two cheaters you caught in the act, and so on. It meant that while I never grew tired of my city, it did grow very familiar, and I ran into my fair share of deja vu on the job.
Join the dots
But the game handles its limited resources quite well. Sure, they repeat, but they vary in importance. That soppy love letter might be the lynchpin of your investigation in one case and nothing more than a minor detail in your next. The text is still the same, of course, but it won’t always demand your attention enough for you to really notice. You’ll be too wrapped up drawing literal red strings between names, faces, and locations on your caseboard.
It’s a catnip concept for players as Holmes-brained as me, and it works. Scouring crime scenes for clues, adding them all to your conspiracy board, and sorting the pertinent wheat from the irrelevant chaff will have you feeling like a proper sleuth, especially when you stumble upon a novel way of trapping your quarry. Take, for instance, my side job to hunt down someone’s stolen diamond necklace. The only real details I had were a single fingerprint and the victim’s assertion that it must have been someone he knew.
If I’d wanted, I could have gone through his address book, pinned the names of everyone he knew to my board, cross-referenced those names against the city directory to find their addresses, and broken into all of their flats one-by-one to dust for matching prints and maybe even stumble upon the missing jewellery.
A lot of effort. Why not start easier? Instead, I had an idea. Several of our victim’s acquaintances lived in the same building, and there was one spot where a lot of their fingerprints would be gathered all together. I took the lift down to the ground floor and pointed my fingerprint scanner at the mailboxes.
Ding ding ding! We had a matching print on the slot belonging to a neighbour. All I had to do was break into his flat to get back the valuables and I’d solved a case in minutes that could have taken an hour. Am I the greatest detective to ever live? It’s hard to say. But yes. It’s the immersive sim mantra of ‘What would happen if I…?’ applied to crime scene investigation, and it works.
Those moments of genius can give way to moments of idiotic chaos at whiplash speed, mind you. You’ll be methodically poking through an apartment for clues one moment before fleeing the cops the next. Plenty of crime scenes are guarded by cops who don’t want you there. If they overhear you run across a floorboard or switch on a computer, they’ll poke their head in. All of a sudden you’re wrenched from your mind palace and sprinting past the police, or smashing a window and leaping out, or taking them on in fisticuffs. As the city’s one honest cop, you can never use guns as anything other than bludgeons to knock people out, a choice I love for preventing you from just shooting your way out of problems. They can shoot you, mind. Good luck with that.
Crime and punishment
There’s a ‘but’ here, though. Shadows of Doubt’s vision of investigation is a pretty narrow one, revolving around forensics and other hard evidence rather than anything social. Catching the bad guy is always a matter of linking some identifying bit of evidence to a time and a place, you’re never going to outwit them into revealing themselves. You can never be Columbo.
Because despite the clockwork city they live in and all their unique details—everyone has a job, a schedule, a bedtime and rising time, as well as blood types and fingerprints and shoe sizes—the citizens you share your town with are never much more than 2D impressions of people. You get the same dialogue tree with everyone, and persuading them to give up details like their name or whether they’ve seen a particular person recently is just a matter of increasing a bribe amount until they submit. Which isn’t much of a sacrifice: Money very quickly becomes meaningless as you finish your jobs.
The result is a city that breathes but does not live: Its inhabitants go about their day, never changing their relationship with you or with each other. Honestly? From my own playthrough I remember places and events, but no people. Even if you take a baseball bat to one of them, they’ll forget it ever happened as soon as you round the corner and shake their pursuit.
It almost feels greedy to ask of a game that’s already so ambitious, but some kind of social element would have taken Shadows of Doubt from a game I really liked to a personal all-timer. If murders emerged organically rather than mechanically, because the relationship between two procgen characters happened to be driven by the game’s systems down a negative path rather than—as now—because the game decides it’s time for a murder and picks two people to feature in it, their narratives would be far more memorable. Likewise, if a key witness in a case refused to help me because I’d previously exposed their philandering in a separate job, I’d never forget their name.
But that’s a big ask, I know, and perhaps it’s for the best that it’s not in there. Shadows of Doubt is already running so many calculations about its citizens at all times that it chugs semi-frequently on my 3700x and RTX 4080-equipped PC, and that’s with a medium-sized city. Trying to load up one of the super large, 600-people cities the game can spit out isn’t really playable, at least for me. It’s no slideshow, don’t get me wrong, but it hitches so much and so often that it’s just not worth enduring. If it was also constantly reconfiguring a set of relationship values I might be forced to only spin up cities of about 10 people. Maybe for a sequel set in a small English village?
Case closed
But despite a few technical and mechanical gripes, Shadows of Doubt is an impressive and unique addition to the immersive sim pantheon that manages to do a whole lot with relatively little. I’ll definitely be pouring plenty more hours into it over the months and years to come, particularly if the developer keeps updating at anywhere near the pace it’s managed over the game’s early access period. I can’t think of any other game that’s made me feel like the sleuth this one does, nor one that’s made me feel as much of a glorious idiot when I leap out of an eighth-story window to escape an angry squad of cops. You take the rough with the smooth, detective.
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One part detective sim and one part chaos generator, Shadows of Doubt lives up to its influences as an immersive sim that actually makes good on its ambitions.