Shadows of Doubt offers players an immersive detective experience in a customizable, procedurally generated city. The procedurally generated city is fully explorable. Every nook and cranny, every room, floor, and even air vents are real places that you can visit in the game world.
The resulting cities are believable; apartments, stores, rooms, electrical boxes, security cams that all work together to provide an immersive detective sim experience. It truly is a living, breathing world.
As a detective, players must solve crimes by exploring every nook and cranny of the city, following leads, and collecting evidence to deduce the killer's identity. The game's sandbox approach gives players complete freedom to solve crimes in their own way. May it be legally, or illegally.
Players can use legal methods such as interviewing NPCs, obtaining search warrants, and gathering evidence through legal channels. Alternatively, players can resort to illegal means such as breaking and entering, stealing, lying to NPCs, or even using force to get information.
The game also boasts an amazing pin-system where all evidence you find, significant or not, can be pinned on a board and linked with each other to help you in your investigation. Group evidence together, link phone numbers, fingerprints, and addresses to various persons of interest. This allows players to create their own theories and develop a deeper understanding of the crime they are investigating. You can deduce the identity of the killer, or citizen-arrest him yourself for more rewards.
Shadows of Doubt is still in early access, but is showing immense promise with its already playable state. Optimizations are badly needed, as it struggled to run smoothly on my decent RTX 3080 system, with some bugs noticeable especially with NPCs interactions. Regardless, it is already a playable and acceptable experience that already offers a ton of replayability and immersive fun.
Full Review will be posted soon here on Taptap! Stay tuned!