ranzware
It was a rainy day when she walked into my office, hard rain, like stray stones from a truck on the highway hitting your car bonnet. I lit my cyber-cigarette and put my feet on my desk, I don’t know why, I thought it would make me look nonchalant to this strange woman. She wasn’t impressed. “Detective,” she said, glaring at me with eyes like gorgeous tennis balls, “I want to open today’s advent calendar door.” I was confused. “Whaddya wanna do that for, missy?” She sat back, relaxed, and pulled a gun from her purse. “I need to stuff a body into it.”
It’s procedurally generated murder mystery sim Shadows of Doubt!
Brendy: I laughed a lot playing this immersive detective sim, which saw a 1.0 release this year. You play as a wandering gumshoe responsible for solving crimes in a greasy cyberpunk city often plagued with rain, fog, and snow. On paper, this means arriving at a murder scene, gathering bullet casings, taking fingerprint samples, and pocketing suspicious notes, then neatly questioning the deceased’s known associates until you discover a suspect who matches all your evidence. Once known, you can arrest them yourself, or just call the local police to come and do it for you. All in a day’s work.
Except that’s never how it goes. More likely you will find yourself scanning every mailbox in a hallway for the hundredth fingerprint, or dodging bullets from the security turret in an insurance company office following a bungled break-in, or freezing half to death in the vents of a vast and complicated high-rise apartment building after trying (and failing) to find your way into a suspect’s home. Shadows Of Doubt is not a power fantasy about being a crack detective, it’s a role-playing delight where you steadily learn how to be a slightly less shit detective than you currently are.
A big selling point of the sim is that its cities and people are all randomly generated, and that murders will happen intelligently and systematically, one after another. Absolutely anyone could be the next murderer, and they all have their own detailed identities and schedules. They go to work, to the bar, to the diner. Every person on the street has an eye colour, a shoe size, a number in their bank account (positive or negative). You might solve one crime in a day, while others will take you so long the criminal will end up killing again.
This makes it a massively ambitious game in terms of its design, and it doesn’t always feel as organic as it might like. Every NPC interaction has the same repetitive questions and answers, for example, and patterns in each killing mean that they too can be repetitive in a way that breaks the illusion a little. But even with those problems (and the many bugs) it still managed to send me into fits of laughter, and offered enough variety for many nights of playful confusion and revelation. The minute you find that crucial document, or discover that hundred-and-first fingerprint that matches the one on the murder weapon – that’s when it all comes together and you excitedly mutter under your breath: “gotcha!”
Graham: I have solved precious few cases in Shadows Of Doubt, but it hardly matters. Murderer to catch or not, it’s fun simply to investigate its downtrodden populous, to map all the data of their lives and pin it to my corkboard like a conspiracy theorist in need of a theory. Where so-and-so works, where they live, who they’re dating, the diner they eat at, all of it gathered by hacking computers and breaking into businesses. It’s the fun of being Adam Jensen and reading other people’s work email as you crouch behind their desk. They might not be a killer or a crook, but they could be one day – or so I tell myself, as I spot an office work move to leave and decide it’s time to follow someone new.
Head back to the advent calendar to open another door!
Kurt Indovina
Add comment