Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
It was a rainy day when she walked into my office like a lost stone, heavy rain, when Bono was hit by a car on the highway. I had put my feet up on my desk with my cyber cigarette, I don’t know why, I thought it would make me invulnerable to this strange woman. She wasn’t surprised. “Detective,” she said, looking at me with her beautiful tennis ball eyes, “I want to open the door to today’s advent calendar.” I was confused. “What do you want to do for this, Missy?” She relaxed and pulled out a gun from her bag. “I’ve got to stuff a man into it.”
It’s a procedurally generated murder mystery sim. Shadows of doubt!
Brandy: I had so much fun playing this immersive detective sim that released 1.0 this year. You play as a wandering gumboot responsible for solving crimes in a cyberpunk city often plagued by rain, fog and snow. On paper, this means arriving at a murder scene, collecting bullet casings, taking fingerprints and pocketing suspicious notes, and questioning the deceased’s known associates thoroughly until you find a suspect that matches all your evidence. Once identified, you can make the arrest yourself, or simply call the local police to do it for you. All in one day’s work.
Otherwise, it won’t be like that. You’ll find yourself scanning every mailbox in the hallway for the hundredth fingerprint, or dodging bullets from security turrets during a standoff at an insurance company’s office. Cooling half in the respiratory system After trying (and failing) to break into the suspect’s house, a spacious and sophisticated high-rise apartment. Shadows of Doubt isn’t a power fantasy of being a crack detective, it’s role-playing fun where you’re constantly learning how to be a little less detective than you are now.
The sim’s biggest selling point is that its cities and populations are all randomly generated, and assassinations are done one by one in a clever and methodical way. Absolutely anyone can be the next killer, and they all have their own detailed identities and agendas. They go to work, to the bar, to the diner. Every person on the street has an eye color, a shoe size, a number in their bank account (positive or negative). You can solve a crime in a day, while others take a long time before the criminal kills again.
This makes it an ambitious game in terms of design, and it doesn’t always feel as organic as it should. Every NPC interaction has the same repetitive questions and answers, for example, and the patterns in each kill mean they can be repetitive in a way that breaks the illusion. But even with those problems (and many bugs) they still managed to send me into fits of laughter, and provided enough variety for many nights of playful confusion and revelation. The minute you find that crucial document, or find out that the hundredth and first fingerprint matches the murder weapon – then it all comes together and you mutter under your breath: “Gotcha!”
Graham: I’ve run into precious few issues in Shadows of Doubt, but it’s okay. Whether or not to catch a murderer, researching her downtrodden population, mapping out every detail of their lives and pinning a conspiracy theory on my corkboard is just as much fun. Where people work, where they live, who they hang out with, where they eat dinner, it’s all brought together by hacking computers and getting into business. It’s the joy of showing off. Dwarf fortressA generated story, or being Adam Jensen and hunched over behind their desk reading other people’s work email. They may not be killers or crooks, but they might be one day—or so I tell myself, when I see an office worker leaving the building and decide it’s time to follow someone new.
Head Back to the advent calendar To open another door!
