HomeFeaturesShadows of Doubt
The RPS Advent Calendar 2024, December 22ndThe Bug Sleep
The Bug Sleep
Image credit:RPS
Image credit:RPS
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 simShadows 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, orfreezing half to death in the ventsof 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.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Fireshine Games
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!”
Headback to the advent calendarto open another door!
