Pounding pavements late at night, the PI’s bread and butter.
NEED TO KNOW
WHAT IS IT?
A procgen immsim starring a PI. Potentially other abbreviations too
EXPECT TO PAY
£20
DEVELOPER
ColePowered Games
PUBLISHER
Fireshine Games
REVIEWED ON
AMD Ryzen 3700x, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080
MULTIPLAYER
None
LINK
store.steampowered.com/app/986130/Shadows_of_Doubt
Shadows of Doubt is a procgen immersive sim that’s a love letter both to noir crime fiction and any videogame that’s ever had an 0451 code in it. Its voxelised cities are shrouded in darkness even at midday, and every building is connected by a network of traversable air ducts the game spins up when you load in.
You’re a PI: a private dick with no money, no flex and a police scanner, picking up murders and kidnappings the corrupt local cops won’t solve and piecing them together yourself for cash and social credit – a gamified class system that confers perks and privileges on a rarefied few as they ascend the ladder. Climb high and you get the ultimate prize: retirement.
But really, why retire? Your city, which you generate at the start of the game gets a lot of things right, but I don’t think I loved anything more than I loved the experience of just wandering its streets, flats and hallways. This is a game which knows vibe, from the rain hammering on the glass of an eerily silent apartment to the tannoys blaring ads in the streets to the discomfiting whirr of a security camera in an unlit room. It knows exactly when to spin up its sparse, synthy soundtrack and when to let diegetic sound do the talking.