Shadows of Doubt review - a fascinating sandbox of little consequence

Our Verdict

Shadows of Doubt is an intricate simulation of a grim corporate world that handles player freedom on a level you rarely see. The fascination wears thin as you delve deeper into the seedy underworld, but the initial intrigue alone is worth the price of entry.

Shadows of Doubt is a voyeur’s dream. You’re a P.I. trying to scrape a living in a harsh alternative past where megacorporations run the country and the sea levels have risen and birthed filthy, neon-soaked city islands. You’re a nobody in a city full of nobodies; ideally, that’s how it’ll stay.

Shadows of Doubt is a first-person semi-procedural detective game. There is no ultimate goal, other than to make a life for yourself. You pick up jobs off of scraps of paper pinned to phonebooths, and keep your ears glued to your police scanner in case something juicier comes along – which it inevitably does.

There are few games I’ve played that promise a living world and actually deliver. Take Skyrim, for example, where you have a small village of people who have their loops; they go to work, come home, their name is Gerald. You know the drill. Their schedules dictate where they’ll be at any point during the day, but there isn’t much depth beyond that. In Shadows of Doubt – at least on paper – each person has a fully realized life, with everything from rent payments to eye tests for you to rummage through.

It’s difficult to understand just how dense Shadows of Doubt is when you first load in. In open-world games, it’s generally par for the course for the NPCs to merely have the illusion of an existence. Ultimately, they’re there for you, and whatever sidequests you might have brewing at the time. Here, though, each citizen has a job, a place to stay, and a sleep schedule – it all moves like a functioning society (whatever that is).

Everyone has a unique set of fingerprints, a blood type, and even a specific handwriting style. When you learn something about someone, it creates a file on them – talking to them in person will add their face to your file, for instance, but if you don’t yet know their name, it’ll appear instead as “???”. You can ask people questions, but most don’t like to be bothered and will tell you as much.

The jobs you’ll take on range from solving murders to trashing an apartment. Early on, I stole a document from someone named A. Ba. That was all the information I was given. Wracking my brain for a minute, I thought that the procedural elements had suffered a bit of a nightmare and given me an impossible task. How can I find A. Ba in a sea of people who all collectively don’t want to talk to me?

I’m sure a lot of our younger readers won’t know what this is, but we used to have this thing called a phonebook, and this phonebook contained the names and numbers of everyone in a particular area. Well, Shadows of Doubt has a phonebook – huzzah! I leaf through the tome of names and find my man, A. Ba, his number, and his home address. This is brilliant.

I traipse across town to Mr. Ba’s building, enter through the front door (as one tends to do), and head downstairs. The address I got from the phonebook leads to a basement apartment. I knock on the door and hear movement – he’s home. This doesn’t make my job impossible, but I would have to be more careful. A man answers the door in his underwear. I’ve woken him up. I ask him a few questions, like his name, but he doesn’t want to answer. I leave A. Ba to it and go on my way – straight to a vent down the hall.

Entering the vent, I work my way around to A. Ba’s apartment and can drop down into his bathroom. I can hear him snoring in the other room, so as long as I’m quiet I should be able to sneak around unnoticed. The first thing I spot upon entering the one-bedroom flat is how sparse it is – a far cry from the lavish top-floor apartments I may or may not have broken into on other jobs.

I search as thoroughly as I can in the dark, but for the life of me cannot find the document I’m looking for. After a short while, I hear A. Ba waking up. Panic sets in as he rises from his bed, turns the light on, and clocks me crouched in the corner like some sort of kleptomaniac goblin. A scuffle ensues. I manage to knock him unconscious and decide that since he won’t be waking up for a while, I’ll search the apartment again with the lights on. Nothing.

Downtrodden, I leave Mr. Ba’s through the front door and high-tail it from the apartment building. What did I miss? I go back to where I originally took the job and ruminate for a minute, eventually deciding to give the phonebook another look. Turns out there are two A. Ba’s living in this cesspit. Whoops. After I finished laughing, I felt bad for Ajani Ba, who just wanted to sleep after a long shift. Instead, he got me, a seemingly unhinged man in a trenchcoat who broke into his apartment, beat him unconscious, and threw a load of couch cushions around the place.

Shadows of Doubt gives you complete freedom in its dense sandbox. Sometimes too much freedom, as poor Ajani Ba would attest. Entering a tower block and looking up, you’re met with tens of floors, each containing apartments and small businesses, each occupied with people just getting on with their day. It’s with this, though, that the cracks start to show.

The act of piecing together a lead from the barest of information is fascinating. I feel so very clever working my way to my goal, and that everything I do is earned. Nothing is handed to you in Shadows of Doubt, which can be a minor frustration at times, but I’m now convinced that this is user error, rather than anything on the game’s side.

Detecting is fulfilling, but the rest of the game, sadly, falls a little short. Your conversations with citizens are repetitive and bland, with no real personality on show. The stealth is frustrating, but perhaps most jarring is the utter lack of consequence to your actions. After I completed the disastrous job earlier, I returned to Ajani Ba’s apartment to see what would happen. He was home, again, and answered the door when I knocked. I asked how he was doing and got the response “comme ci, comme ça” before he went back to sitting on the sofa.

The city is so finely poised. It runs like clockwork. The issue with that is throwing something erratic into the mix (me) often breaks the illusion. I came across a person being mugged down a side street, so I attempted to intervene. Instead of breaking up the in-progress mugging, my aggressive action resulted in the mugger, victim, and everyone else on the street turning on me and beating me senseless.

Shadows of Doubt is a game that is very, very wide, but as you get into the weeds, not as deep as I’d like. It is a truly impressive thing to behold, with the rain-slicked streets and neon-soaked interiors hosting a playground that contains more boxes of rental agreements than you could ever hope to read in one lifetime. It’s something I could see myself returning to, not essentially to find a rampant killer, but just to exist in.