Sam Reader 2/12/23 Sam Reader 2/12/23

Shadows of Doubt Preview/Demo Impressions: Delightful Detective Dystopia

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
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.

Sam Reader 2/11/23 Sam Reader 2/11/23

Book of Hours Preview/Demo Impressions: The Thinnest, Tastiest Vertical Slice

Book of Hours arrives in full resplendence this June for PC. If this is the (admittedly thin) vertical slice we’re getting so far, I for one can’t wait to dive in.

Book of Hours
Platform: PC
Developer: Weather Factory
Publisher: Weather Factory
Release Date: June 2023

Book of Hours, the latest upcoming game from bizarre art collective/writing duo/indie game studio Weather Factory, has tantalized fans with brief glimpses over the past few years, finally dropping a small playable demo during Steam NextFest. The game, which promises to be something like an “occult librarian simulator” with a similar interface and art style to previous indie smash Cultist Simulator, casts you as the Librarian of a mysterious clifftop library called Hush House, a punishment for some nebulous crime. In your capacity as Librarian, you catalog books, read forbidden knowledge, make nice with the townsfolk, and uncover secret Wisdoms that might lead you down dangerous pathways or cost you your sanity while giving you new skills.

The demo begins with you washing up on the shores of Brancrug Isle, home to the clifftop library of Hush House and the town of Brancrug Village. The Village is a town of suspicious people, requiring you to gain an introduction from an old friend before you continue your journey towards the Library. From there, you unlock a few locations— the local post office where you can send and receive letters, the local pub where you can hire laborers, and one of three places in town where you can gain favors and help: the local blacksmith, the rectory where the Vicar lives, and the curious duplex where the local Midwife and the Undertaker live together. Your goal (as much as there is one in the demo) is to rescue yourself from the beaches of Brancrug, find your way up through the Village, and eventually make your way into Hush House itself, where the demo ends.

The Wisdom Map from *Book of Hours*. *Credit: The Gamer’s Lounge/Screenshot*

There’s a lot to love here. The expressionistic visual style, rendering everything out of blocks of color in a way that feels one part painting and one part collage. The return of Weather Factory’s unique adventure-game system, one that sees you collecting cards and slotting them into various actions around the map. Even the newer elements of the work, which include a scrollable map and the ability to arrange objects inside the individual rooms of your library. It’s very impressive, and the way the game handles larger map elements with progress bars beneath each location is a novel way to deal with the constantly advancing clock, letting the player see what’s going on as they zoom in and out of the map.

The problem is that the demo is very short, comprising barely the beginning of the game (in fact, the demo ends when you get to Hush House, where the meat of the game supposedly takes place). It makes it difficult to get too many impressions from it. Book of Hours hints a lot at interlocking systems, from the simple (telling fortunes at the local pub for money) to the complicated (the upgrade tree is a dizzying web that dwarfs Cultist Simulator’s Mansus screen, with cryptic hints as to what you need to upgrade). Even getting off the opening beach requires careful and slow consideration of your options. What you get is fantastic and finely tuned, though, in spite of being abrupt.

Maybe that was the idea? Hint at something grand, show what you have for now in a sort of playable alpha format, and get people on board for the rest? If so, it’s certainly intriguing. Given the degree of control in the demo, one can only hope that the full game is as promising and broad as the demo suggests, the systems as deep as Weather Factory promises.

Regardless, we won’t have long to wait, as Book of Hours arrives in full resplendence this June for PC. If this is the thin vertical slice we’re getting so far, I for one can’t wait to dive in.

Sam Reader 4/20/15 Sam Reader 4/20/15

Victor Vran Preview

Victor Vran , the new game from Tropico developer Haemimont Games, is an ARPG like Diablo or The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing. It's set in a crumbling castle somewhere in Europe, filled with all manner of creepy and crawly creatures. While many people have noted similarities to other ARPGs out there, Victor Vran adds a new element to action-RPGs that most other games have ignored: Height.

What sets Victor Vran apart from the other games mentioned above is the ability to jump over walls, wall-bounce to hard-to-reach points, and otherwise navigate the battlefield in a wholly different way. It adds an element of platforming to the game, as well as a level of tactical control-- Why get swarmed by a horde of spiders when you can get to higher ground above them, or stand on a nearby hedge to avoid their attacks? Why not leap over your enemies and get the drop on them from another angle?

Victor faces down a horde of the undead.

While the game is still in early access and so there's placeholder art and enemy variety is a little low, the game's combat system is completely functional at this point, and many of the levels are finished, so you can go tearing through castle gardens, crypts, and caves with a variety of swords, scythes, hammers, guns, and demonic powers. Adding some variety to things, there are a series of challenges for each mission, urging players to consider exploring all of an area to hunt down secrets, chests, and bonus bosses to defeat.

I'm excited to see how Victor Vran develops into a full-fledged game, and while I know there's definitely some missing pieces right now, what they have already is reason enough to keep watching this.