Fyonn
did their best!
So Shadows of Doubt just came out of no where and hit Early Access. This game is a game design marvel. It has the kind of structure that game developers day dream about. Such a leap in terms of clockwork design that we might be looking at the line that will define the difference between "classical" and "modern" immersive sims. This is the kind of background detail you see in Dwarf Fortress, streamlined. Uncovering that underlying complexity of every NPC is the point - the source of every smoking gun and every dead end your intuition deceived you into following. I cannot imagine a world where we do not see a tiny explosion of games just like it in the coming years. I hope one of them is about vampires.
Up front, since I know this will turn some people off frome the game: Shadows of Doubt is a game where your character needs to eat, drink, sleep, take showers, and avoid getting sick. BUT! In the single greatest innovation of all time for games with those types of survival mechanics, you can disable or enable each status effect individually. Don't want to worry about needing sleep? Turn Tired off in the options, but hey, you can leave Well-Rested on so you get a slight benefit when you do sleep. Okay with broken limbs but don't want to nearly bleed out over one measely little gunshot? Turn off Bleeding but leave Injuries on. Personally, I turned off Cold and Hydration. I turned Hunger and Tired off at first, but the aesthetics of needing a coffee and mediocre synthburger at the diner after an attempted arrest turned into a fist fight is so quintessentially noir to me that I will put up with the consequences.
Shadows of Doubt uses procedural generation to create a city of roughly 1000~ people, all of whom are simulated running their daily schedules in real time. And then. A murder happens. It runs in the simulation, too - NPCs need to source their calling cards and weapons, need a way to access the victim, and a motivation - jealously, hatred, the thrill of the hunt, maybe even a dash of ritual sacrifice. In the same way that setting grass on fire in Breath of the Wild provides a convenient updraft, every action the perpetrator, victim, you, and all 997 other citizens take ripples outwards into unavoidable marks on the world. Notes, fingerprints, shoe prints, receipts, litter, bullet casings, entry wounds, phone calls, and v-mails where someone finally says they were wrong and they're sorry - all of it contributes to the chaos that truth might be extracted from.
One of the few ways someone like your default-non-binary player character can make money is by handing in a Return of the Obra Dinn-esque Murder Investigation Form to City Hall in as much (accurate) detail as possible. All you have to have to get paid is the killer's full name, but you can more than double that payout if you're willing to do things like identifying the murder weapon or making the arrest yourself. See, in the hyper industrialized future of 1979, the President of the United Atlantic States, the megacorporation Starch Kola, has replaced all law enforcement with their Starch Kola Enforcers. And Starch Kola Enforcers? They enforce. Not so big on the "solving crimes" thing.
Oh, maybe I should explain - it's 1979, with 1979 tech for the most part, but Henry the IVth of France was never assassinated, so the industrial revolution happened early, in response to William Lee's knitting machine. Then 200 years of other stuff happened. Now the world is mostly tiny manufactured island "cities" the size of a few blocks, built primarily vertically because the rising sea level means that land is a very rare commodity. So you've got your cyberpunk aesthetics alongside landline telephones with routing stations in every building's basement - remember that, it'll be helpful if you need to figure out where a phone call came from with no other information.
If you pick the slightly more curated Dead of the Night game start - and you should, the tutorial teaches you the basics then pushes you into situations that make you ask and discover the ways you can interface with the world around you - your custom character wakes up to a phone call from no one and a note under their front door to find <insert citizen name here>. Spoilers: they're gonna be dead when you find them. Shot, probably, but maybe not. Even the tutorial is different for every player. As you get your gear together, you get painted a pretty grim picture of your character's life. Basically bankrupt (not that there are banks) with barely any food left, recently broken up with their partner, a genetic scientist of indeterminate gender named Sam, only housed due to the (rapidly narrowing) influence of the Former Police Officer's Welfare Association, and signed up for a frequently bizzare leasing agreement you can read in full. By the way, everyone has one of these, and they have to be signed - remember that if you need someone's handwriting and/or signature for your investigations.
Once you - frankly - break into the victim's apartment, you're going to find their corpse and a whole pile of potential evidence. Anything and everything you find that might be even remotely relevant, pin it to your case board. You can review and reorganize it later, pause the game and check it at literally any moment of gameplay. The game will make some connections for you with the iconic red thread of conspiracy, but you can add your own with accompanying notes and in a variety of colors to represent your assumptions as opposed to the cold hard facts the game highlights for you.
But first: turn the TV on to drown out the sounds of your movement and identify an alternate escape route or hiding place ASAP, there's only so long before the silent alarm is triggered and Starch Kola Enforcers will arrive to helpfully remind you that breaking and entering, interfering with a crime scene, and stealing that gun the victim bought and failed to use for self-defense are all very illegal. That red number in the upper left, assuming you can pay it, is how much your crimes will cost in fines if you get caught. It might be safe to assume that getting caught with 10,000cr in stolen SyncDisc Vials unrelated to your investigation might not result in as lenient a wrist-slap as that time you "accidentally" lockpicked a fuse box and "accidentally" flipped the breaker for the floor's lights and security cameras. Hold on, that's a thought - maybe check the CCTV footage from around the victim's time of death, it's only deleted after 24 hours, and a physical description of the killer is priceless. You did remember to examine the body for the cause and time of death instead of getting distracted picking paperclips off their desk, right?
Don't worry though, no matter what you've done in the pursuit of justice and/or personal enrichment, the Starch Kola Enforcers are not here to solve any crimes you commit either. The second you step back out onto the streets, your crimes cease to exist, and no one cares if that sniper rifle the victim purchased from the black market actually belongs to you or not. Possession is eleven tenths of the law, as they commonly said in 1979. Push comes to shove, if no one actually manages to report your crimes, did they ever really happen? Do keep in mind, people prefer living to dying, so pulling any kind of weapon is sure to escalate things quickly. Try to stick to your fists if you must fight, or maybe a truncheon from behind - at least they'll (probably) live through that.
By the way, see if you can find the victim's notes on the black market they must have bought that gun from - those kinds of places require passwords for entry. Just don't spend so much time on finding it that you can't sweep for fingerprints. Fingerprints fade, but notes won't. If you have to come back later, a crime scene the Starch Kola Enforcers already know about is a less volatile location to infiltrate, assuming you come back before they clean it up in two days or so. It might practically be a crime to solve crimes, but no one else is doing it. City Hall is paying you to make them appear competent and capable, not to be free from guilt. Just think of the trespassing fines as an incentive to remain discreet.
While you're still in the victim's apartment, make sure to find their landline and personal address book. That'll get you phone numbers, hopefully, and almost certainly addresses for people they know. This first visit is probably your only chance to call 540000 on their phone to find out the number of the last person that called them. Once you're back on the streets, mind your step - it's pouring rain and running could cause you to slip. There's a helpful slippery indicator in the upper left if you're at risk of falling.
Now's a good time to walk down to the local diner and buy breakfast and coffee. Ask around, maybe somebody knows the victim or saw something suspicious. Most folks are duly cautious - they will rightly tell you to fuck off now that they safely can, and sometimes they'll even be polite about it. 50cr might grease the wheels of... justice...? But bribery is also a crime. Maybe you should just buy that breakfast and keep moving.
Take a look at the notice board next to the pay phone - people need things done, and are willing to pay. You know, public humiliation here, corporate espionage there. Finance more supplies or even get paid with a genuine SyncDisc. Go down to the local 24/7 self-service medical clinic, rewire your genetic code to be a little faster, a little stronger, a little less stoppable. Sam would probably have some opinions on that, huh?
Once the sun's up, go grab a murder report form from City Hall, buy another pack of 30 paperclips (you'll need them). Maybe pay an early morning visit to the victim's place of work. Make note of the hours of operation so when you come back tonight you'll only need to worry about the cameras and automated gun turrets instead of Astrid and her "short temper," if the HR records you're about to dig through are to be believed. I'd have a short temper too if I worked with so many men reprimanded for flirting with co-workers. And that guy who's trying to get two different people to give him a second chance after they each discovered he was cheating on them with a third and fourth person respectively. Damn, man, how do you even find the time?
Solve that case. And another one. Become the goddamn Batman. Keep it up long enough, keep your finances above water, get noticed as a valuable member of society and you might just earn yourself an invitation to the Fields - the only way anyone ever gets to retire, somewhere that still has real land. A place that definitely actually exists and isn't just a euphemism for something far worse, where your talents might be put to use for the greater good (of Starch Kola). But that's just speculation. You'll have to play to prove me thankfully wrong or unfortunately right.
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