Gaming News Between Cyberpunk 2077 and Deus Ex, this promising open-world video game cannot be missing
If you’re a fan of mystery games, Shadows of Doubt shouldn’t stay under your radar.
Which mystery games lover has never dreamed of this type of experience: a vast urban and nocturnal environment, illuminated by the simple glow of neon lights, corrupted by crime in each of its narrow and damp alleys; a kind of charged sandbox in a film noir where murders and crimes never end, for the pleasure of spending hours solving them. That’s more or less the promise of Shadows of Doubt, an immersive stealth and investigation game that opts for a fully simulated criminal cyberpunk noir sci-fi environment.. Made available in Early Access just a few days earlier, it gives us the sweet pleasure of playing a private detective who is responsible for solving a series of missions and also apprehending a serial killer, the Holy Grail of the profession.
The Dream Investigator Experience
Developed by ColePowered Games, a small studio with big ideas, Shadow of Doubt’s mad ambition fuels dreams whose realization for the time being is quite promising: a world simulated by procedural generation, home to hundreds of people, each with a name, job, At home and a perfectly coordinated routine; all of this can therefore be shadowed for the good of a mission. Our great adventure begins in a run-down apartment whose rent we will soon no longer be able to pay. Under the bottom of our front door, an illustrious stranger slips a note that hints at a great epic: “Find Onni”. Here’s what ignites our natural detective instinct and neither one nor two, here we peel the city’s directory in search of this nebulous character, who turned out to be a corpse strewn across his living room floor.
Armed with your fingerprint scanner and your little fists wielded via a totally impractical interface, you’ll then have to gather as much data and clues as you can before someone finds you at the crime scene and sends you to the hospital, enough to open up multiple leads. Here remains the most exciting part: the investigation can start with the piece you prefer ; So it’s up to us to search Onni’s office at his place of work, prefer index of the call received before his death, go to the last bar he had fun at, or even stop at a track on the way to start on top of each other. Any small notable find can be pinned to our large blank board which quickly becomes intriguing to connect each element with a plethora of red threads
A long way to go
Once we found the murder weapon and the perpetrator, it was very difficult to interpret the reasons for the wrongdoing. At the moment, the world of Shadows of Doubt suffers from a narrative that is too opaque and lacks logic.. During our infiltration sequences, it is a must for reasons of discretion to turn off the alarm system and keep the lights off the cameras. However, opening the door of an apartment just hanging under the eyes of its occupant does not seem to be a problem for him, provided you stay on the doormat. A few hours later, illegally opening a tenant’s empty mailbox will incite the anger of a neighbor who will delight us with a lot of bullets in his heart. Interactions with NPCs represent the game’s main lever to improve
Keep in mind that Shadows of Doubt is in Early Access and the studio is making sure to collect player feedback for the final version: “The full version of Shadows of Doubt will include additional content and optimizations that will be introduced during Early Access. We are currently planning to add new content such as new and improved cases, new locations and options for interacting with citizens, and a more complete and polished gameplay experience.“. The studio still has some work to do to create the ultimate investigative experience, yet the sandbox appeal kept us hooked for hours. Other mechanics, barely outlined during our run, are exploited in parallel: our character depends on a health bar, apartments to rent and improve, and a wallet to fill. Here we can’t wait to discover the game in its complete and improved version.
