Shadows of Doubt - detective stealth game set in "fully simulated" sci-fi city - now available on Early Access

[EvilWolf]

Hmmm. I like the idea but, playing it now, the NPCs let the whole thing down. Not only in the very basic conversations you can have with them, but in their total lack of awareness. Everything you do feels inconsequential - there's hardly any guards or security anywhere, so breaking into the phone router thing of a building is a case of literally just walking through the nonexistent lobby and straight down the stairs to it, impeded by no-one. At most, there might be a camera you can walk right under. There really needs to be dedicated guards and staff at various posts in these buildings.

For the higher end apartments sure. Throwing an item to distract them or using a social engineering dialog option to either get them to walk away or let you in would be a welcome change to camera/laser dodging.

 

[Talby]

Played this for a couple of hours, and it seems interesting but it goes in the "has potential, but needs work" early access bin. Games heavily featuring procedural generation often sound amazing on paper but fall flat when you play them. Unless there's some kind of major breakthrough in the realm of generated content, I'd rather they just design a series of well crafted mysteries.

 

[Parsimonious cook]

I assume that the game will have the main story line series of handcrafted cases, with the procedural stuff being there to allow players make money and add hours to play time. I could be wrong though.

 

[Jinn]

I assume that the game will have the main story line series of handcrafted cases, with the procedural stuff being there to allow players make money and add hours to play time. I could be wrong though.

Really hope you're right about this. Procedural stuff should never be anything but supplementary.

 

[Zombra]

Last I heard, the plan was to let go of the handcrafted cases, at least for now, to focus on making all procedural elements run perfectly. Maybe down the road the main case will come back but for now it is gone. Yes, I was disappointed too.

 

[Gostak]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/986130/view/5769729865631696390




Go ahead, diss it like people on Steam and allegedly on its own discord as well.
I have no qualms and still love the game for both how it still can develop and get modded AND for how and where it's at currently in both regards.

Apropos currently: It's on a 20% discount.
Beware: I would not advise to buy at minimum or prolly not even at recommended specs, you better have a beast of a machine for this still, I guess!

 

[Jinn]

Go ahead, diss it like people on Steam and allegedly on its own discord as well.

What are they saying about it? I know the only thing keeping me away from the game is the procedural generation of the majority of the gameplay.

 

[Gostak]

Er, I meant specifically the small drama around this update. They hang themselves up on "major update" vs. "ooh the little we get here from the two or so devs for this 'major update'" and
"omg they dared to write and stress 'FREE' in an update for a title in EA".
It's of course their valid opinions, one just is entitled to ones own and does not have to care about theirs or take 'em with a pinch of even more salt, I guess. >_<

 

[Jinn]

Oh yeah, this game is probably going to be one of those infinite-term early access titles. Funny that people are already whining about it. They shouldn't have bought it. I'll never make that mistake again.

 

[Zombra]

I know the only thing keeping me away from the game is the procedural generation of the majority of the gameplay.

I apologize for judging your tastes but I feel like this is a mistake. The game is built on systems, not narrative, and the systems are very satisfying. I guess that's in part because there is nothing quite like them anywhere else. Would the game be better if it were 10 handcrafted missions using these systems, instead of thousands of procedural ones? Maybe, maybe not; but it's worth $20 to at least see a few cases (and there are more than several unique case types - even more now with this week's update).

Oh yeah, this game is probably going to be one of those infinite-term early access titles.

They're going a bit slower than anticipated but keeping decently to the road map. I expect official release around next summer. This will not be another 7 Days to Die or ARK.

I'll never make that mistake again.

I completely respect waiting for full release on this one. I don't know the current state but it still needed a lot more time in the oven last I checked.

 

[kangaxx]

Still keeping a keen eye on this one, albeit waiting for the full release.

 

[Aemar]

This shit is impressive to say the least. The graphics are eye cancer inducing though.

 

[Aemar]

The most impressive aspect of them all is that it seems this game is the work of only one main developer. Whatever was achieved in this game from a technical standpoint is outstanding. It really goes to show that you don't need to employ thousands of sweatshop pajeets to make a proper game.

 

[orcinator]

This shit is impressive to say the least. The graphics are eye cancer inducing though.

It's looking like a game it's more fun to tell stories about than to actually play, which is often the case with sandboxy games; every time I hear the guy say "and after 10 mins of x, I still had nothing" I get reminded not to download it yet.

 

[deama]

Are they thinking about integrating chatgpt into it?
There's some decent local ones they can add in, or make it online.

 

[Gostak]

This shit is impressive to say the least. The graphics are eye cancer inducing though.

It's looking like a game it's more fun to tell stories about than to actually play, which is often the case with sandboxy games; every time I hear the guy say "and after 10 mins of x, I still had nothing" I get reminded not to download it yet.

Experiencing a truly fun/ good emergent story by playing yourself is better than to hear about it.
And you'd have to play to tell any you experienced yourself. What fun would it be to tell other people's stories?
Also if there were no potentials for "[10m of blah and still no real progress]", solving stuff could hardly feel good when you do?

The stuff that gets generated and simulated and the freedom the game gives you to use your time however you like is good.

What helps it as well is that you can have three cases concurrently going and abandon any you feel has no leads left to make it not uber tedious.
But sure, it's a time-sink still.

If you mess up and reach the scene far too late or get caught there and end up in the hospital there may be little clues left for you to go on, here murder cases are easy because the
murderer will strike again.

Fresh runs on the highest difficulty can be tricky. But with the cases you can still sort of choose your own difficulty (same with city size and resorting to use the government database).
Murder cases can be especially so, they choose you so-to-say and not vice-versa and they feel urgent because having the murderer kill
off some shop clerks next or so would be annoying and lower the appeal of the city you play in as that character.

If on the other hand you get kitted with good synth-disk upgrades that does not help the challenge.


As said it's already good for what it is, I doubt waiting more here will change much if anything at all about the point you raised.

 

[orcinator]

Experiencing a truly fun/ good emergent story by playing yourself is better than to hear about it.

The highs might be higher but if getting there involves hours of tedium then no, sometimes it's better to just get the highlights and not the full experience.

That youtuber got stale after two vids but if someone put real effort into it and did, for example, a proper Rorschach larp, hurm whores and all, that'd be cool.

 

[Latelistener]

Checked the last version to see how things are going:

- DLSS options are nice, but the game isn't even GPU heavy and yeah, it still works bad with 30fps on the streets. While reading the Steam forums I sometimes get the feeling the dev himself doesn't understand why
- Went to the murder site and found a body between a bed and a wall and the "satanic" pentagram was there too in that little 30cm space. The game doesn't even check whether there is actually enough room to draw it
- Figured that even if I started the game on the streets I'm not a bum and went to my own apartments. Once I entered them I was given the status "trespassing"
- Fell 3 times or so through the textures while solving the murder breaking my legs

You can surely enjoy it for what it is, it has a nice atmosphere and a simulated city. But if nothing major happened in the last 6 months since the release, then nothing will until the actual full release

That 91% positive rating on Steam is not for this game, but for another one that will take this proof of concept as an inspiration to make something working and enjoyable

 

[JarlFrank]

Oh for fuck's sake, this game has massive potential and I love playing as a detective and figuring out cases, but it has sadly been infected with the woke virus.

Non-binary is an option in character creation, and a few NPCs can have that made-up gender too. This muddies up your detective work and absolutely doesn't fit into the setting, which is 1990s tech combined with classic noir aesthetics. Figuring out who suspects are by their appearance is part of the gameplay, that includes appearance and clothing.

When it comes to clothing... I found the apartment of a culprit with two pairs of high heels in there. Scanned the fingerprints on both, they belong to different people. I guess she's a lesbian living with another woman then? Or a female friend is currently visiting and took her shoes off?
Haha no, one of the pairs belonged to her husband. Items of clothing say nothing about the owner's sex. Men can have high heels, women can have boots. This game has items of clothing that are clearly gender-coded in the real world, but aren't in the game. This is supposed to be a detective game where you gather clues in order to find out the identity of people you investigate. Muddying things up like that is actively detrimental to the core fucking gameplay.

I haven't seen it in my game yet but someone on the Steam forum says that even items like birth control pills aren't exclusively owned by women, lol. What a joke. Why have an item like this, that can give you clues about the character's identity, not actually give you clues about the character's identity?

It's a fun game overall but this really sours the experience.

 

[Zombra]

For the first time ever, gay, androgynous, and transvestite characters are appearing in detective fiction! Noir was never like this!

 

[Lemming42]

I do agree though that the game could be better if there were more clues that let you actually pin someone as a certain demographic. The birth control pills are an obvious one - like, if you found "masculine" clothing and other things that made you think you were in the apartment of a man, but then found birth control pills in some corner somewhere, you could realise your suspect was actually a woman. That'd be a way to reward people who do thorough searches, and misdirect people who make hasty assumptions. Crossdressing is fine, especially since it's a fictional setting with no obligation to follow the social codes of 2020s Earth, but ideally there would be more ways in which you could understand that certain items or articles of clothing are more likely to belong to people of certain demographics, albeit not guaranteed. Obviously in a noir movie you could have a suspect's crossdressing be a whole plot point with little clues pointing to it throughout the story, but in Shadows of Doubt procgen world it doesn't connect to anything.

It makes me think it'd be fun to have this type of game in a fantasy setting. Like oh, here's some stupid gemstone that only Elves tend to have, so we're either dealing with an Elf or an Elf-weeaboo.

 

[JarlFrank]

For the first time ever, gay, androgynous, and transvestite characters are appearing in detective fiction! Noir was never like this!

You know that's not the point in a game with procedurally generated cases. There need to be rules to make the exceptions from the rule stand out. As is, the game's algorithms don't have any rules when it comes to what kinds of items can be owned by what kinds of people.

And "non-binary" doesn't fucking exist, especially in the perspective of a detective who only cares about who the perpetrator is, not what he identifies as.

 

[Latelistener]

I have some doubts that the dev plays his own game. Generate a city and you'll 100% find many bugs and inconsistencies.

Probably some of the stuff mentioned here is the lack of proper polish, rather than just being woke, like women wearing men's shoes, etc.

 

[JarlFrank]

Generate a city

Why would you when there's a hand-made city available?

I think the default city is hand-made rather than proc gen (at least most of it?), which is, of course, the superior option.

 

[Zombra]

You know that's not the point

Oh, so it's no longer about the setting now you've been debunked? OK cool, let's forget about the setting.

There need to be rules to make the exceptions from the rule stand out. As is, the game's algorithms don't have any rules when it comes to what kinds of items can be owned by what kinds of people.

Let's talk about this alleged lack of rules. Turns out there are a million rules in place you can use to track down suspects, but that's not enough for you. You can already match footprints at a crime scene to a suspect's shoes in their home or on their feet, but that's not enough for you.

You need, I guess, to be able to match penis prints to a specific style of shoe, or the entire gameplay loop is ruined. Call me crazy but I think that makes you a very special kind of detective.