For years, game designers have been chasing this dream – a city block RPG, like the ones which Warren Spector mentioned. Though, several contenders have visited this realistic postcard, yet none of them encapsulates it entirely.
Titles like Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Disco Elysium and Else: Heart.Break are very interesting games but they do not fit to the idea of RPGs.
Now, from the indie game scene, we have Shadows Of Doubt to present itself. Much closer to Spector’s dream as an open-world detective simulation game with complex mechanics and extensive design, it is.
Shadows Of Doubt is a game which recreates a realistic urban environment in the virtual space –the environment observed as real people, with their job being ordinary, eating, walking, or …murdering.
This is a multifaceted, grand, and often dysfunctional system. However, the vastness of the game along with the additional lore filling the seams of the game really makes it a worthwhile endeavor.
You are a private eye walking the rough streets, completing the small tasks and murders along the way. This game is about careful investigations – gathering, and particularly analyzing, clues, crime scenes and so on.
In terms of gameplay, it is splendid: characterize the Moving of Hanoi as the first-person explorational, wherein any object can be clicked at, to reveal an associated clue. You work in case of fingerprints, boards with clippings, photographs of a crime scene are part of your routine.
As you may well appreciate, more often than not, it becomes such a tedious task where one is required to go through files, contracts, and records in order to solve cases.
It is not an over-the-top action game but something more strategy oriented at certain moments it feels closer to Cluedo or the Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective games.
A lot of the game is concerned with what might be described as fun work. This includes practices such as rifling through records of employees and scanning contents of computer disks in dark rooms, after gaining the access inappropriately.
Another important part of a murder case is bureaucracy, for example, you must go fill out papers at the city hall even when you are officially closing the case, detailing the suspect, the weapon and the scene of crime.
This also gives it a sense of read, more bearing and planning feel, and makes it more realistic and even lending to the experience. But realism is not always followed by perfect predictability. In fact, Shadows Of Doubt cultivates a degree of disorder.
The game’s desire to replicate every part of a city creates genuine emergent gameplay. There are moments when you fumble to find the actual leads; sneak around the suspect’s place; and fight henchmen, which feels like it doesn’t belong in any video game, yet in the end, you spend hours doing it.
The mechanics of the inventory are equally as clunky, but these inconveniences are small complaints in what feels like the joy of problem solving within this world—like tossing a revolver into the water to make room for a paper or using the items around you to simply solve a puzzle.
However, it should be mentioned that there are no traces of polished and refined music here. Infact it embraces a certain level of chaos. That way NPCs can sometimes act in a random manner which is also rather strange and can contest immersion.
Conclusion
Shadows Of Doubt has intricate multi-layered structures providing promising inspector work; its flaws are also part of their uniqueness.
Shadows Of Doubt may not be exactly the embodiment of Spector’s “city block” vision, but it successfully places itself firmly into the world of immersive sims and deserves a place in gamer’s libraries for its audacity and the fascinating mode of controlled anarchy it offers players. If you are into emergent gameplay and like the idea of being a detective –this game is a ride.