Shadows Of Doubt (PC) - Preview

Early Access and a story-driven focus or procedural generation and story-focused elements to a game are two points I always find contentious with each other. If in Early Access, I’m being spoiled on a linear story that is being polished. If it’s partly procedurally generated, it often isn’t a very coherent story either. The latter is most evident in Watch Dogs: Legion. Although it had a story that went in one direction, the procedural generation of characters hampered telling that story coherently for many. Shadows of Doubt is an Early Access mystery game where you have to crack the case of a procedurally generated world and murder.

When I was quite young I always dreamed of playing a sandbox game where you could go into any building, any room, and practically do anything. Ambitiously, Shadows of Doubt does that exact thing, within reason of course. You can’t go in and defile a corpse, you are investigating murders not trying to cause them. It is smaller in scope than, say, Grand Theft Auto or a similar open-world sandbox, and Shadows of Doubt only has you on a small island in an alt-history with themes of early cyberpunk. Matched with the voxel art and captured at the right angle, it looks quite beautiful.

The question is, does it hold up as a mystery as well as a sandbox with such ambition? At times early on, yes. That is certainly damning with faint praise, but it is sadly the case with a game that is so early in its playable stages. All the mechanics theoretically work and work well. They aren’t always clashing with each other to create a combustible element, but that isn’t to say there aren’t times when gears grind a little. One such component could be down to the immersive sim mechanics.

Being set in this twisted dark version of the 70s that probably has an R Deckard somewhere in the phonebook, the tech is that blend of simple retro commands and early 90s desktop interface. This means there is limited space on-screen for large buttons. As such, the CCTV that you will have to interact with only records the day before and the day you’re currently rolling through. There is a ticking clock (quite literally) on your acquisition of evidence in a case. That can be frustrating, especially given the fact you need to work out all the elements of this puzzle.

A body found with bullet wounds in them? You will need to find the people selling guns, who will obviously be cagey, and ask for a password to enter the demon’s lair. Which is something that you might overlook when trying to find all the evidence surrounding the body. You might spend half the day knocking on doors looking for other leads that might get you somewhere. Someone might have seen or heard something vague that you can’t follow up on, there might be another clue to follow. Ultimately, that’s the point, you have the choice of what to follow in a world defined by algorithms.

It is at this point the wide scope hampers the concept of depth. You see, with a couple hundred named businesses and private individuals in your small city, they are all working off of roughly the same few lines of dialogue options. I had a few people tell me that they saw a person that was dead from 10:15 at about 16:00, and I was asking this question at 15:58. Either there is a conflict in the equation here or her neighbors collectively murdered her. Either way, detectives Seymour Butts, Richard ‘Dick’ Finder, Ivor Long One, or Mike Crack will be upset.

There is currently a medium-sized map that can hold 300-400 people, and a very large map (5 by 4 blocks) with up to 500+ people with their own stories, details, individual fingerprints, homes, and so on. My point is that at this scale, you’ll easily be lost sometimes in getting to evidence such as CCTV cameras, or you may simply struggle to find the right person. Finding someone to cooperate with is hard enough, as many individuals will rightfully tell you to sling your hook. With no badge to present, a lot of people refuse to assist you where they can/typically would.

From a technical standpoint, the scope is impressive even if the simple art style is rudimentary enough to facilitate that. Despite this and the number of people roaming around the city, there is a sense of death looming over everything; not the corpses, the living. With such a wide scope, there was hardly ever going to be dialogue that is voiced, but what little is there in TV shows or advertisements highlights the silence that inhabits your procedurally-generated worlds. The sound of footsteps and doors opening and locking sometimes elevates the sound of rushing wind and the din of depressing music, though fleeting it might be.

Muffled arguments via text boxes in the next room as you hide next to JC Denton aren’t accompanied by the cacophony of slams or bangs typical of overheard arguments. Nor is the bustle of busy streets or corridors at knock-off time. There is simply this sense of nothingness, a void of what we most connect to when we want to be pulled into a world like this. To be immersed not only in fundamental activities such as eating and sleeping but also in the sensory elements.

Since we’re talking about the technical elements of Shadows of Doubt, it must be said that performance at this stage is far from perfect. Set to the highest graphical options possible or simply turned on, a GeForce 30 Series or lower-end CPU might even struggle when loading certain aspects. I say this because developer ColePowered Games mentioned that “I’d recommend at least a GTX 1060 for 1080p at present.” Running on a 30 series at these high settings I am able to run Shadows of Doubt at 60 frames per second. However, to say it is constant would be a lie as it can lurch around violently.

If you’re interacting with a PC in-game that has a connected CCTV system and wish to scroll through the footage to find your victim or murderer, you might find the frame rate dropping to 30. It practically chugs sometimes like Thomas going up a steep hill, on those days Thomas was the little engine that couldn’t. Busy locations like stairwells around 5 PM can also be a point of contention for your CPU. It is not to the point of being completely unplayable (there goes my PC Master Race card), but is worth the warning.

In theory more than anything, Shadows of Doubt gets the initial collection of evidence done correctly. In practice, putting that evidence together through procedural generation can cause issues. CCTV of the crime scene on one of my cases within the sandbox mode showed the victim before death, then for the rest of the day despite being left there, he was no longer tracked by cameras. His body was directly in front of the camera. I can forgive 5-minute intervals not exactly capturing the murder in 4K or showcasing my characters, but I know when I got there and where the body relatively is.

Playing cop or whatever you are (Private Dick Finder, I believe), you would assume there would be some way of tracking weapons or working with law enforcement to catch the murderer. Maybe you could even question the individuals that last saw or were seen with the victim. Simple things like where were they going, what did you talk about, when did they last fire their weapon that happens to be the same as the murder weapon? This is the trouble with procedural generation. I’m asking people that saw the victim at odd times, and I’m told of streets and places that don’t exist on the map. Even the phonebook tells me of people that don’t exist.

I’ll accept that I am stupid, because I am. Though I do believe a good puzzle or a good mystery game should at least make you feel smart once in a while. That is always in question when the procedural generation could go wrong. I was tracking a lead of the only W Duan in the phonebook in a case and I found her, but the case board where all your profiles and evidence go didn’t connect the dots. In another case when following the weapons sold with the right caliber, I found multiple names not in the phone book. How do you track people that don’t exist?

With such a large scope it isn’t as if you can line everyone up in a row and find out what they look like. They have their own lives and are constantly moving around. If there are people that aren’t in the phonebook (or are constantly mislabeled), then it is like searching for one particular atom in one person you know nothing about in a galaxy full of them. Though when you do click one piece of the puzzle into place, even in the defined tutorial story level available now, it isn’t all that satisfying.

The truth is I like (and want to like) Shadows of Doubt. There are a number of ideas that work and let you play out some of your cyberpunk-noir fantasies like Altered Carbon or the Avery Cates series. The aforementioned issues where gears sometimes grind a little are possibly coming from minor issues (fractal-ing out) and have yet to be ironed out. This is why I struggle with story-focused early-access titles, you don’t know how or if problems you (and others) have will be fixed.

Ultimately flawed in one or two places where it matters in your corkboard mystery, Shadows of Doubt isn’t blazing out of the blocks at the start. Though the goal is met to solve a crime or two, refinement in Early Access will do Shadows of Doubt the world of good. When it works and all the pieces fall into place, the facade is maintained, but when there is a hiccup either through performance tanking for reasons unknown or characters talking nonsense, the wall crumbles or the curtain falls and we can see the wizard pulling the strings.

A PC preview copy of Shadows of Doubt was provided by Fireshine Games for this preview.