Shadows Of Doubt review – indie detective noir

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 by finding a hiding place when the outsourced authorities arrive.

Shadows Of Doubt screenshot — Shadows Of Doubt – the characters don’t look great (Fireshine Games)

Despite the film noir theme, stealth is the most prominent element of gameplay and yet it’s easily the worst part of the game and absolutely no fun at all.

That’s a shame, because Shadows Of Doubt contains some really good ideas. Its noir atmosphere is great and its sandbox mode, in which you generate a new city on the fly and earn your detective chops by working small jobs from bulletin boards in bars and restaurants, is pretty ambitious.

But even that is marred by the fact that all the cities you generate (in practice, you’re generating a small part of a much bigger city) pretty much look the same and contain procedurally-generated inhabitants doing all the same stuff, only with different names and addresses.

Graphically, Shadows Of Doubt does itself no favours. No doubt in order to avoid the difficulty of having to randomly generate faces, it uses blocky Minecraft style voxels. The PlayStation 5 version also contains some jarring visual glitches, with things like footsteps seemingly floating above staircases.

However, if you manage to solve a few cases, establish yourself as a detective and level yourself up (you can improve your attributes using what the game calls sync disks), you’ll start to discern a wider narrative, involving a serial killer and the sinister megacorp Starch Kola. Unfortunately, that takes an age to unfold and the amount of clunky, frustrating stealth action needed to find out what’s going on is not going to be worth it for most people.

It’s a great shame, because for such a tiny developer to display so much ambition is laudable. But, unfortunately, Shadows Of Doubts’ gameplay doesn’t live up to the intriguing promise.

Shadows Of Doubt review summary

In Short: A clever and unusual indie detective story, but the emphasis on clunky stealth and samey cases quickly saps your enthusiasm for the pixelated noir setting.

Pros: Great atmosphere and clever use of procedural generation. The sleuthing is very good, with a neat interface and freeform progression. Decent music.

Cons: Unimpressive graphics and the randomly-generated cities are too similar. Clunky fighting and fiddly stealth gameplay. Main story takes too long to unfold.

Score: 6/10

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £19.99
Publisher: Fireshine Games
Developer: ColePowered Games
Release Date: 26th September 2024
Age Rating: 16