Shadows of Doubt review

What is it? A procgen immsim starring a PI. Potentially other abbreviations.

Release date September 26, 2024

Expect to pay $25 / £20

Developer ColePowered Games

Publisher Fireshine Games

Reviewed on RTX 4080, AMD Ryzen 3700x, 16GB RAM

Multiplayer None

Steam Deck Verified

Link Steam

I found Emily in the basement of Etheridge Heights, a squat tenement on the edge of town, overlooking the water. She was a mess—hands tied, bare knees pressed into the cement. I looked worse. My hunt kicked off when I found the ransom note in her flat: Leave 4,000 credits under the bridge by 9:15 pm or she dies. By then it was already 4 in the afternoon.

Since then I'd been everywhere, sprinting from one end of town to the other over and over and over. Collecting fingerprints, taking statements, rooting through trash and smashing down doors. I was a wheezing, bleeding mess, starving and stinking. But my perseverance paid off. Cross-referencing a suspicious email in Emily's inbox with her address book and the government database of citizens gave me a suspect, and I lucked out when a local convenience store clerk had seen my perp lurking around the building.

It was a banner day until I snapped on the cuffs, sneaking up behind our kidnapper as he made his way home and wrestling him to the ground. I could already see the headlines: 'HERO GUMSHOE NABS SNATCHER'.

My fellow citizens didn't quite have that context, though. All they saw was a weird, un-uniformed scuzzball tackling an honest citizen without provocation. They were on me in seconds with bats and guns. One minute I was making an arrest, the next I was breathing through tubes in a hospital bed. Better luck next time.

Shadows of Doubt is a procgen immersive sim that's part Deus Ex, part Chinatown, and it's finally hit 1.0 after a promising year and a half in early access. It's a love letter both to noir crime fiction and any videogame that's ever had an 0451 code in it: Its voxelized cities are shrouded in darkness even at midday, and