Shadows of Doubt

Shadows of Doubt is a first-person detective stealth video game by British developer ColePowered Games. It was released in early access on April 24, 2023, for Microsoft Windows. Upon its early access release, Shadows of Doubt received average reviews, with critics praising the innovative potential of the game's open-ended, player-directed design, whilst critiquing its repetitive elements and bugs. Publisher Fireshine Games announced that the game would be released on Xbox Series S/X and PlayStation 5 in late 2024. ColePowered would later reveal a physical release for both console versions.

Gameplay
Shadows of Doubt is an open-world detective investigation game played from a first-person perspective. The player works as a private investigator who pursues murder cases in a city. The city's layout, its citizens and their routines, and all murder cases are procedurally-generated per save file, and the player can choose the city's name, size, and seed. The player has access to police transmissions and is alerted whenever a murder is reported, allowing them to open a case. The details of each murder case are randomly configured: murders may occur anywhere and at any time, any citizen can be involved, the crime can be carried out through a variety of lethal methods, and the available forensic evidence can include fingerprints, surveillance camera footage, witness observations, and more. The player also has to contend with false leads, time-sensitive evidence, anti-intrusion security measures ranging from locked doors to automated turrets, and hostile responses from citizens who catch the player doing anything illegal.

The player can complete a murder case by submitting a case resolution form to the local city hall. The form has five fields: the suspect's full name, their address, a piece of evidence placing the suspect at the crime scene, the murder weapon, and whether the suspect has been placed under arrest. Only the murderer's name is required for a successful submission, but a cash bonus is rewarded for each optional field that is correctly filled out. If the player accuses the wrong citizen, they will be fined and the real murderer will continue killing. Sometime after a murder case is resolved, the game will automatically select another citizen to carry out the next string of killings, presenting the player with a fresh case.

The player's overarching goal is to increase their social credit score by solving murder cases. Reaching the maximum social credit score enables the player to leave their city and enter retirement, concluding the game. Meanwhile, money earned from murder cases and various odd jobs is needed to purchase certain investigation tools, rent and furnish an apartment, pay for medical care when injured, pay off fines, and bribe citizens for information or access to restricted areas.

Setting
Shadows of Doubt takes place in an alternate history that diverges from the real world in the year 1610: Henry IV of France is not assassinated, allowing English inventor William Lee's knitting machine to spur an early industrial revolution in France. Consequently, the Jacobite rising of 1745 prevails in England and Charles Edward Stuart is crowned King Charles III, leading to lasting peace between the two countries and the subsequent formation of an Anglo-French Empire under Louis XVI, which in turn quells the American Revolution in 1776. The Empire is torn apart by rebellions during the Mustard War from 1891 to 1901, and then reorganized into the democratic United Atlantic States in 1902, which enshrines corporate personhood into law in order to rebuild its economy. In 1965, Starch Kola, the world's oldest megacorporation, is elected President of the UAS and replaces local police forces with the privatized Starch Kola Enforcers.

The current year is 1979, and the player is a citizen of the UAS. Due to hyper-industrialization, radioactive fallout from the Mustard War, and rising sea levels caused by global warming, most people live and work in cramped, smog-shrouded cities isolated by the toxic water. Every UAS citizen dreams of attaining the lofty social credit score necessary to retire to The Fields, an exclusive district purportedly located in one of the last unsullied regions. As a former police officer, the player has the skills and tools to take on freelance investigation work. Since the Enforcers are spread thin, willing citizens are permitted to investigate murders, catalog evidence, and arrest criminals in exchange for cash and social credit score promotions. The catch is that successfully solving a murder as a freelancer often involves bending or even breaking the law.

Development
ColePowered Games began work on Shadows of Doubt after launching Concrete Jungle in 2015. In the original iteration of the game revealed in 2018, the gameplay involved managing a detective agency to solve crimes in a procedurally-generated city viewed from an overhead, isometric perspective. The management simulation aspect of the game was later discarded in favor of a first-person perspective, allowing the player to personally take on the role of a detective. At this stage of development, the player was still part of a detective agency and had a team of NPC experts to consult and task with analyzing evidence. The process of developing 3D assets for the city was simplified by adapting building models from Concrete Jungle and using a combination of pixel art and voxels. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the development schedule, although a rough playable demo was created for the canceled EGX Rezzed expo in 2020. Writer Stark Holborn was brought onto the project to flesh out the setting.

A closed alpha test of Shadows of Doubt involving 250 participants was held in mid-2021. This was followed by a public demo that was first made available during Steam NextFest in February 2023, after which ColePowered Games confirmed the game's early access release date.

Reception
The early access release of Shadows of Doubt received an average reception. Describing the game as "incredibly refreshing", Rachel Watts of Rock Paper Shotgun praised the game for its "thrilling" sleuthing and advantages over scripted detective games, commending the "hands-off" design of the game in spite of its "overwhelming" pacing and investigation failures. Zoey Handley of Destructoid found the game to have "amazing" potential, citing the game's "believable" and persistent world and "fun" casework, but noting the game's state was "pretty rough" and "can sometimes break in interesting ways and defy logic". Whilst praising the game's "fun" gameplay loop and "impressive" open-ended design, Liv Ngan of Eurogamer found Shadows of Doubt to be unengaging and the world to be "formulaic" due to its procedural setting, noting the game's repetitive elements, the lack of player behaviour on the outcome of a case, and the inconsistent visual styles and cultures in the game's setting.