The potential of this procedural detective game is through the roof! | Review - Shadows of Doubt

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Shadows of Doubt is a sandbox detective game developed by ColePowered Games, featuring procedurally generated cities, voxel-based graphics, and an impressive lighting system.

Shadows of Doubt offers players an immersive detective experience in a customizable, procedurally generated city. The procedurally generated cities are based in an alternative hyper-industrialized version of the 1980s with its mixture of old technology and sci-fi noir vibes to it.

Everything is real

The cities are 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.

The gameplay is centered around your custom character, who is a detective that lives in an apartment. He takes on procedurally generated cases to solve, and the player is given freedom on how to solve it. Follow leads, scan fingerprints, organize evidence, use gadgets, scrounge through trash, and analyze the environment.

Detective gameplay

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.

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.

This freedom allows players to develop their own unique playstyle and create a personalized experience. To bolster its detective simulation experience, it also features a simple stealth system where sound and light are important to detection, especially when trespassing and doing illegal activities.

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.

RTX on?

Another super impressive aspect of Shadows of Doubt is its lighting system. The game's voxel-based graphics provide a unique look that is rather simple when it comes to models, but it's the lighting system that really makes the game stand out. It looks ray-tracing good, the way that light reflects off of surfaces and creates shadows is simply stunning. It's clear that the developers put a lot of effort into creating a visually stunning game that immerses players in a believable world, despite the rather blockiness nature of the voxel-based in-game models.

As with the sandbox nature, without a clear story or narrative, some players may also find the game's slow pace and lack of direction off-putting, as the game doesn't offer much guidance beyond the initial case briefing. However, there is sort of “manual” guidance available for the players to assist in their deduction-making gameplay. You can set waypoints to different places in the map, and the game will give you a waypoint and route to follow.

Early Access woes

The game 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 system (i7-8700k, 32GB, RTX 3080), with some bugs noticeable especially with NPCs interactions. Regardless, it is already a playable and acceptable experience. I initially tried playing on a controller, and while it was fully supported, the controls are evidently primarily designed for Keyboard and Mouse and it shows. It’s hard to navigate between UI elements using the controller and I highly recommended switching over to Keyboard and Mouse control.

A true sandbox experience

Shadows of Doubt offers an immersive and rewarding detective experience. The freedom to solve cases in any way players see fit, combined with the game's detailed world and pin-system, make for a deeply engaging and satisfying experience. The game also offers a good amount of replay value even at its Early Access state, as players can try out different playstyles, reroll whole cities, and approaches to solving cases.

Conclusion:

Shadows of Doubt is a highly unique and impressive detective game that offers players a sandbox experience like no other game I’ve tried. The game immerses players in a believable world that they can explore and investigate to their heart's content. While the game may have some on-going optimization issues and bugs, The overall experience far outweighs the negatives, and it’s only going to get better as the game nears completion. If you're a fan of detective games and enjoy sandbox gameplay, Shadows of Doubt is definitely worth watching or even worth supporting.