Shadows Of Doubt – infinite detective agency (Fireshine Games)
A new indie game offers a pixelated film noir set in an alternative history dystopian that’s a cross between Blade Runner and The Maltese Falcon.
Shadows Of Doubt sounds great on paper. It’s designed to appeal to the thwarted private eye that exists within all of us, while acting as a homage to classic hard-boiled detective film noir. At the same time, it makes clever use of procedural generation, in order to conjure up unique cities within which you can lead a vicarious life as a gumshoe. It’s an ambitious concept, made all the more impressive because it’s a more or less solo project from indie developer ColePowered Games.
In many ways, it achieves its ambition to be a more free-form, unstructured, and randomised take on the likes of Ace Attorney. It certainly possesses a distinctive visual style but at the same time it betrays it indie origins on far too regular a basis and ends up feeling like more of an intellectual exercise than a truly enjoyable game.
Shadows Of Doubt sets its scene and tone quite well. It’s set in a dystopian alternative universe, in which industrialisation has run rampant, with private megacorps taking on security responsibilities rather than the police. As a consequence, its inhabitants are mostly rather paranoid, and security measures like cameras linked to gatling guns are pervasive. But technically speaking, it is set in the 1980s, so its technology only reaches as far as landline telephones, analogue cameras, and very primitive computers.
In the main story thread, you wake up in your designated apartment and amass a basic set of detective tools, including lockpicks (for which paperclips and hairpins will suffice) and a fingerprint scanner. A note under your door brings your first case: an apartment to visit in which you discover a dead body.
Interface-wise, Shadows Of Doubt does OK: each case you take on generates a pinboard to which you can attach all clues and evidence connecting related items. The map is crucial, as it essentially gives you blueprints to every building in the city, which you can examine floor by floor, and when you identify particular buildings for investigation you can click a button to set a route indicated by arrows that will take you there.
As well as scanning for fingerprints, much of the clues you find are gleaned from telephones – there’s a number you can dial to find the last call made to any phone – and the city directory, which matches inhabitants and businesses with their telephone numbers. Hacking computers (which, like security doors, you need passcodes for) and telephone routers is also a common activity.
Amassing leads is fun, but sadly that’s only a small part of Shadows Of Doubt’s gameplay, which is more about stealth. In that initial apartment, for example, once you’ve collected all the necessary evidence, a silent alarm will trigger, and you’ll have to make an escape, either through the system of vents that crisscross every building or …read more
Source:: Metro
