Shadows of Doubt
Review

Shadows of Doubt (2023) is an open-world detective game set in a fully simulated city of crime and corruption. You explore the city to discover criminality, find clues, solve crimes and earn money to fund bringing a serial killer to justice. It stands out for every citizen having a life of their own, and the slow detailed work of following clues around the open world to solve crimes one piece of evidence at a time.

The city is a hyper-industrialized version of the 1980s. This means you have a range of retro-futuristic gadgets to help you on your quest. As you move around the world, you get to know the living-breathing rhythms of the metropolis. Each mission gives you clues (locations, descriptions, leads) to help you track down what happened. This sends you out into the living-breathing world to piece the clues together and assemble them on your case board.

As you piece together these clues and take on more cases you dig deeper into every nook and cranny of the city. It's a challenge of piecing together the evidence to identify what happened and who did it. You explore trashy bars, offices, and hotel rooms each contributing more clues. You can break into apartments, rifle through secret documents, hack security systems, check call histories, find passwords and read private emails.

The result is a who-done-it game with an open-world twist. Rather than following a linear series of puzzles to solve a crime, you dive into a living breathing web of criminality and piece together who really is to blame. Follow the money, yes. But also follow the discarded receipts, meetings in alleys and fingerprints inadvertently left in hotel rooms. You learn to think like a detective, which it turns out is a lot of fun.

Our examiner, Andy Robertson, first checked Shadows of Doubt 10 months ago. It was re-examined by Jo Robertson and updated 7 months ago.