Shadows Of Doubt Is A Detective Game With Too Many Threads To Untangle
I hope you don't mind if I'm a little honest with you. For several days I struggled to write this article about Shadows of Doubt. Not because I don't know what to say, I know what I liked and didn't like when I explored the various crafting cities, but because I don't know how to put my thoughts about this game together. And I think I've had a really hard time with that because I'm not sure Shadows of Doubt really know what they want to be.
We have already written about Shadows of Doubt. Martin covered the game for Rezzed Digital in 2020 and I read his mind before he played. He was impressed with what he saw, and I know a good egg martini, so I wanted to try it myself. However, the various descriptions given by Shadows of Doubt confuse me. Martin called it "a first-person detective game set in a vibrant procedurally generated city," while developer Cole Jeffries also described it as a dark sci-fi and immersive simulation.
Of course, this is a detective game. The game doesn't hold your hand as you solve problems. We need to gather evidence and find out who is guilty. The game's red board, on which all your clues hang, automatically creates connections between related items. It also allows you to make your own notes and connections between shapes and beans, the physical space of the game, to help you understand the crime.
There is a wonderful freedom in your approach to problem solving. If you need to find a place, you can try to get in by picking the lock or sneaking through the ventilation. You can enter after a series of more powerful hits. If someone is inside, you can try to bribe. Most citizens don't want to open up that easily, so you often have to use one of these methods to find what you need. Unfortunately, you can only ask a certain number of questions. Unlike Ace Attorney, where you can present evidence and see what kind of response you get, I was disappointed that I couldn't ask people for specific evidence, like verifying a phone call.
Besides solving cases, I was very interested in exploring the world. Even in the smallest town, there are plenty of buildings to conquer once I get over my reluctance to break the law (consequences be damned). I loved breaking into apartments and offices, rummaging through refrigerators for food, stealing leftover cash, and hacking into computers to read email and employee profiles.
I love this gaming hub, but at the same time, I rarely feel engaged with it. Everything in the world seems stereotypical, and maybe this is a compromise with the procedural generation. Citizens answer the questions with the same answers. Homes rarely feel private, often decorated with televisions and various shelves. Searching for email, which in this context should be the most personal communication, just turns up the same messages, with new addresses and different names.
There are several consequences to the world or your actions in it. I was seen breaking into and stealing from a building and was actually chased by security, but once I ran out of the building and lost my pursuers, nothing changed. I was able to enter the building without tape and no one remembered the chaos of a minute ago.
In the same way, your approach to solving cases does not affect the results. As long as you get detailed information about the crime, like the name of the criminal and the evidence that led him to the crime scene, you get paid for a job well done and your social status goes up a bit. It doesn't matter if I stole money from an intruder's wallet or repeatedly provided witnesses to my break-in and theft when my suspect's apartment was searched.
Perhaps this is a compromise for the noir setting; a dark world where crime thrives and the law exists only in the hands of humans. But, and it's clear even from the first look at the game, Shadows of Doubt is inspired more by cyberpunk than by noir and science fiction. The game takes place in late 1979 in an alternate universe "where hyper-industrialization has taken over the planet". Corporations vie for power as a new nation, the United States of America, elects the mega-corporation Starch Cola as its president.
UAS is a "free" grouping of Western European and North American countries, placing us firmly in the Western part of the world. But every city created has the same Asian iconography perpetuated in cyberpunk. Neon. A random combination of Japanese, Chinese and Korean fonts arranged in arrays. Some streets have paper lanterns, others Chinatown arches. As I walk through the various cities created by the game, all I can think about is why. Why is all this here? Why is there nothing stereotypically French or Italian on the streets?
Although I couldn't find out more about Starch Cola's origin in the game, and even if its origin is explained, the loading screen talks about a tech company called Kaizen-6, founded by someone named Kira Cho. Kaizen-6 with a Japanese name, founded by a person with a common Korean surname. The more you look, the more you see. Lumping East Asian countries together as representatives of American techno-orientalism isn't new to cyberpunk or video games, but I'm tired of it.
In the same way, when you start looking at the finer details of the world, things become less clear. Physical letters are sent around town through vacuum tubes and displayed electronically on a computer (or microcruncher in the game's parlance). In one of my cities, a murder was committed by a contract killer, as I learned from the database of citizens of local self-government bodies. Their profession was listed in the database as contract killers, but if the authorities already knew about it, why hadn't this person been arrested yet?
On paper, I should be absolutely in love with Shadows of Doubt. Sim everything? Check: Detective? Check: Black? Check: But despite the addictive gameplay, none of its parts seem to fit together. I don't know if procedural generation can capture what makes an immersive simulation or detective game great; a place where consequences have real impact and the characters who live there feel like individuals. I admit that this is an impressive technique. the sheer amount of objects and information the game has to generate and link between them is staggering. But for a game with so much authentic content, it was humiliating.
