Shadows of Doubt

Очень давно следила за разработкой этой игры, наверное со времен первых гифок, которых постил разработчик на заре прототипа. Потому что сама концепция игры очень потрясающая, словно мечта, которую еще сформировали на заре такого понятия как immersive sim: здесь можно зайти в каждый дом в городе, проверить каждую квартиру, у каждого НПС есть своя история и каждый такой персонаж может быть обвинен в преступлении и многое другое. Как только игра вышла в ранний доступ, я сразу же купила и следила уже здесь за обновлениями. Было очень много багов и недоработок, которые ломали ощущения от игры. Думала, ладно подожду, когда игра полностью выйдет в релиз. И вот через пару лет игра выходит в полный релиз. Захожу в игру и вижу те же самые проблемы. Думаю, ладно подожду еще, может разработчик еще патчами починит. Захожу еще через год и вижу ту же самую картину со всеми вытекающими. В общем, я не рекомендую покупать эту игру. Концепция прекрасная, но очень плохая реализация.

The framework of something really great exists here, but the game feels shallow and incomplete. And it's buggy. By god, the game is unfathomably buggy. It's not unplayable by any means, but be prepared for: - notes and emails that are simply missing words, creating lots of unintentional dead-ends - some elements of a case not being solvable because the game won't register an action was taken, like you arresting the suspect - NPCs getting caught in a loop where they close up their business for the night, then unlock the door, open it, close it again, lock the door, unlock the door ... - Some of the surevalliance infrastructure not working correctly -- or maybe NPCs simply teleporting in and out of an apartment building room to avoid being captured on camera - poor performance on even high-end rigs - lots of close-range pop-in despite the small city size. So, why did I recommend it? Without a doubt it hits that "detective on the mean streets" vibe pretty hard. Think Return of the Obra Dinn, except way more buggy and with significantly less content. Maybe it's me coming off a Tex Murphy bender, but Shadows of Doubt really hits the spot and satisfies that itch for an immersive detective game. It's definitely the type of game that succeeds despite its flaws, and that's unfortunate, but life is unfair and so here we are. I do recommend waiting for a sale. The list price of $24 is pretty high for the amount of problems the game has at the time of writing.

Dev pushed the game to 1.0 a while back. A broken stuttery unfinished mess of 1.0 and then abandoned the game other than a meme update. Dont buy, the game is actually abandoned now and has glaringly unfinished mechanics that were promised before the rushed release to be implemented properly

I have... mixed feelings about this game. Conceptually, I think Shadows of Doubt is one of the most well thought out and mechanically rich detective games that exist. It holds a lot of interesting concepts, a world that allows for a lot of recycling and replayability, and a general style that works quite well in my opinion. Notice I said conceptually though. At its core, shadows of doubt is a game about potential. It had the potential to be an insanely good, mechanically deep, and properly made detective game with a lot of features. But it stopped halfway. At a certain point, the developers decided to stop pushing out major updates for the game. In most contexts, this would be fine, since all games stop updating at some point. But shadows of doubt was left in a state that left much to be fixed, and even more to be desired. Content feels very repetitive and at times, mindlessly easy. You do one case, and you've pretty much done them all due to the general nature. Obviously there's a few gimmicks here and there, but generally speaking cases aren't all that diversified. If you know the one guaranteed smoking gun, you can probably get the killer in one singular lead. This at first glance might just sound like you getting really good at the game, or like you've learned all there is, but it's different in the sense that it's more just about pattern recognition from how things generate, which leaves things feeling lousy. There's various bugs, like in generation, NPC pathing, smaller mechanics of the game, and room decoration. That being said, if you know Shadows of Doubt is in a less-than-desirable state, and you're okay with the quirks it comes with now, and that it probably won't be seeing those get fixed up, then I think it is worth getting. You might only want to get it on sale, but I do still recommend the game as I think it can be quite enjoyable and fun to play if you don't set your expectations too stupidly high.

This game is unfinished in the most frustrating way. Information you get from asking people is too vague to be useful, and the on paper information is either useful or not. You will constantly overshoot your expectations of how complicated a case is. And the mechanics of the game do not lend itself to exploring a case in any interesting way. Your dialogue options are extremely limited. Find the kidnap victim on accident? Great moment. Now why cant I ask the victim who might be after them, or what they looked like. And what about the opposite scenario? I happened to have the kidnapper in a basement, handcuffed, and have a billy club. And I can't beat the den location out of them? No you can't even ask. Other stupid things, killer is taunting me from a hotel phone I can track down, but you won't ever see the killer on tape or run into them by sprinting there immediately after the call. It comes down to this, if being a detective is tedious, then the game should reward you for looking into complexity. It doesn't. It generates a straight line path to the killer and punishes you for thinking outside the box. At first it feels like "oh I didn't approach that right, I'll try again" and later you just realize you need the script to the novella your playing, you look up the limited versions of them for each type of crime, and then you get it every time in the same way only without it being fun. Polish the ai, Make the "script" play out in the game so you can actually respond to it with creativity, and expand the dialogue, and then I can recommend the game.

It's too half baked and as I'll mention later mods won't save it. The biggest issue in this game is that it's using procedural rather than generative type of case building, and there are only about five cases. This is basically how it works: a victim is chosen at random, a case is chosen at random, a suspect is chosen at random that fits the case criteria, and then evidence is populated in the world based off which case it is. E.g. if you get the coworker case, the suspect is always a coworker, and the same evidence is always placed (iirc a business card with the suspect's fingerprints on it). So most of the cases are trivial to solve because the evidence - and usually the only evidence - is at the crime scene. Depending on what item is left at the crime scene you know what to do. Once you solve each case, like I mentioned there's only about five, then you've pretty much beat the game. What I would really like to see in this genre is a more generative approach which could allow murders and evidence placement to naturally occur. That way each case does truly feel unique. And while there are side jobs and even a kidnapping mission but they all suffer from the same problem above. The final nail in this game was adding mod support. That means the community can go fix everything right? Well, no, modding isn't a magic bullet. It can't change how the core game logic and engine works. You aren't going to be able to add generative cases. However maybe with a dozen mods that all add dozens of cases then you could at least have hundreds of cases rather than just five, right? Well the modding tools they added to the game does not support adding murder cases. You can create side missions, but even that has very limited flexibility and as far as I know there isn't even a mod that tries to create a side mission. That's all to say that the modding tools that were supposed to "save the game" were not as powerful as people thought they were going to be. We are still limited to just five murder cases. it has a lot of very neat mechanics going for it. Fingerprint tracking, getting into a building's phonecall registry to see incoming and outgoing phone calls, security footage surveillance, emails, footprints, blood types, and more. However you will never use them unless you restrict yourself to use them, and even then since the evidence is just slammed in when creating the murder event, then there's typically no additional evidence besides security footage that correlates the murder and suspect. Though that's honestly not that bad of a way to play because the murderer will keep killing suspects until you eventually do find a smoking gun. The performance is very poor and while I have read the dev blogs where he goes over some of the optimizations in the game, there is still a lot of room to make optimizations. I do recommend it though because it's the only game like this in the genre, so if you want to play a game like this, this is your only choice. However the game itself is in a state where it would be impossible to improve. I think the game collected tech debt over the years and it's at a state where there's no ROI left in working on it.

I've been a pro investigator for many years and I like the work enough to invest in steam games of the detective genre. I ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ love this game. This game is SO CLOSE to being perfect and epic. Like its painful but there is really only one key flaw. Speaking to witnesses is basically useless. The logic games in fingerprint matching and tracking people down are very much parallel to the types of snafus I like about investigating in my day job. Even with procedural generation, there are cases that are not straight forward and any investigation IRL is about "I have the person's address, but I need to identify their place of work. What solutions do I have?" The problem? Why in the ever living ♥♥♥♥ can I not ask the deceased person's spouse questions about them? Its so bizarre but the widows often don't want to cooperate at all. Like....your spouse just died. Can you just tell me where they worked instead of being obstinate? It would be fine if the spouse was the killer.....but they aren't. That aspect needs a little work. Adding a simple interview component for those specific data points would be nice and add to realism. Maybe even if they gave some extemporaneous background. There was one case where the murder was religiously motivated (obviously). So I should be able to ask people if they know someone who is a religious nut etc or if they suspect someone as the murderer. That's kind of investigating 101. Even when the NPC (usually the client) willingly says "I think I know who did this!!" There is no conversation query to trigger this info. lol Otherwise its spot on (minus maybe all the crime I'm committing while solving the murders). A+

After so long, it's still a buggy mess. NPCs phasing through doors and locked security shutters, weird UI and control mapping, such a cool idea with poor execution.

У каждого прохожего огнестрел и только наш гениальный детектив кидает пистолет, вместо того, чтобы стрелять.