Shadows of Doubt
Platform: PC
Developer: ColePowered Games
Publisher: FireShine Games
Release Date: “Coming Soon”

Shadows of Doubt is a game that’s wild in the best possible way. It casts you as a private detective in a massive voxel-generated city (even on Small settings, the city still feels pretty large), awash in neon and atmosphere, and then turns you loose, following procedurally generated leads and storylines as you pursue larger conspiracies and evade the law. With its stylized graphics, nonlinear plotline, and focus on immersive stealth gameplay, it feels like a more emergent-narrative Deus Ex, driven by player choice and the procedural generator’s almost gleeful penchant for chaos. While there’s more than enough here to explore in the 90 minutes of the demo, Shadows of Doubt is shaping up to be an ambitious and intriguing new game from ColePowered, and possibly one of the better immersive/stealth games of the 2020s.

Shadows of Doubt casts you as a private detective, recently retired from the police force and broken up from your significant other. In the dead of night, you get a strange phone call and a note pushed under your door that urges you to investigate a seemingly random person. Upon arrival at their apartment, you find them dead and the local megacorporation’s enforcers on the way, plunging you into the middle of a murder case that seems simple on the surface, but gets murkier the more you look into it, delving into serial murder and a mysterious religious cult.

In practice, this plays out as a first-person stealth adventure, with you investigating a variety of leads, everything from hacking telephone records to ransacking apartments and doing business with the criminal underground, all rendered in lovingly blocky voxels that give things a retro-futuristic feel. The cities are always overcast, the apartments are always cramped and located in tight corridors, and the emphasis on mechanical and paper-based communications make it feel like an alternate version of the present, one where things like microprocessors and digitization barely exist. In the current demo build, you have 90 minutes where this city is your playground, running you through the introductory case and then flinging you into the city to make connections, find leads, pay rent, and make your way in the mean streets. It’s a robust series of systems, too, with you needing fingerprints, addresses, phone numbers, and having to evade security systems while you hustle for cash and sneak through vents.

You can investigate crime scenes with a fingerprint reader, hack phone records and safes with a variety of code-readers and other gizmos, or even let your fists do the talking if a witness isn’t cooperating. It’s a vast variety of choices, so large the intro case even comes with a list of leads you can tackle in any order you choose. It’s really satisfying when you get a break in the case, or when you manage to sneak through that apartment you found locked, or when you finally close the case for yourself. The large range of options also means you can tackle things in a way that’s interesting to you, rather than one specific thing.

What makes the game shine, though, is the chaos of it. Noir is a genre all about things going wrong very quickly, and Shadows of Doubt foregrounds this by forcing you to run from the cops in the tutorial. Because of the living city, you can sometimes show up to interrogate a witness while they’re out or sleeping, and they’ll be less susceptible. With the demo’s time limit, this could mean you need to break and enter a little faster, but then if they come home, they’re not going to be amenable to you rifling through their kitchen. Even with permission to be in buildings, sometimes someone will just not like what you decide to do in their space, triggering a conflict. The more things that go wrong (either due to bugs— the game is in early access and a little roughness is to be expected— or mistakes you make), the more interesting choices you have to make and things you have to work around in the case.

While the game suffers a little from lack of polish, Shadows of Doubt is a beautiful thing even when something goes wrong. It’s satisfying to solve cases, easy to pick up, and feels deep enough that you can sink your teeth into it regardless of whether it’s a quick jaunt or you’re in for the long haul. Here’s hoping that when ColePowered Games finishes with it, it delivers on the promise this demo represents, because then this will be one for the ages.

Shadows of Doubt Preview/Demo Impressions: Delightful Detective Dystopia