Shadows of Doubt review: "The true potential of this detective sim is limitless - but it just hasn't reached that point yet"

The first murder victim in Shadows of Doubt turns out to be a gutshot corpse sprawled in their living room. Not much to go on at first glance, but a dropped wallet in the kitchen tells me the dead man's identity, and a note about work rotas left in their bedroom tells me they're a diner chef, a lead I can follow up on later. A shell casing has rolled under the sofa, and I manage to pull a fingerprint off it. That's a good clue – I don't have a match for it yet, but I can compare it to the various suspects I uncover along the way. I pin all of these factoids to the wonderful little corkboard in the UI, loving how I've uncovered all these leads myself without any prompting, while probably missing out on countless others.

From that point on, my choices are practically endless. I could bribe the building's security to let me look at the surveillance camera footage from the hall (or just break into the CCTV room if they're not amenable), interrogate the neighbours about what they heard at the time of the murder, ask questions at the victim's workplace, use an address book to find the home of their closest friend, or hack their computer to look at their email correspondence - and that's just getting started.

These are the moments where Shadows of Doubt comes alive. The investigations, despite being procedurally-generated, are coherent and clever and always demand some analytical ability from the player, even if the suspect's motivation is rarely a factor or especially complex. As somebody who loves true investigation mechanics like those seen in Return of the Obra Dinn, I'm thrilled by having to personally judge a sniper's location by examining bullet trajectory, or make educated decisions about which suspects I can cross off my list as more evidence comes in. A lesser game would just tell you where the shot had come from as soon as you saw the bullet hole, or have your character growl "hmm, I guess the vic's wife has an alibi." But Shadows of Doubt putting the power in your hands makes it all the greater – and what makes it so frustrating when the bugs start creeping in.

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A million stories in the sim city

Bugs aside for the moment, Shadows of Doubt is undoubtedly not for everybody. This is a game where riffling through a phone book is a major mechanic, where systems are built around flipping doormats, where lockpicking paperclips are the highest currency, and where getting out of the shower and forgetting to use a towel can result in you slipping on the tiles. But I can't call any of these things flaws – in fact, they're part of what makes Shadows of Doubt so enjoyable, at least when working as intended.

Shadows of Doubt was in Early Access on Steam for a while now, with the alluring pitch of an immersive sim for aspiring detectives; a fully-realised rain-soaked noir dystopian city with hundreds of NPCs living complete, interconnected existences, committing crimes aplenty for your persistent P.I. to pull apart. But now the 1.0 full release is here (alongside a slew of console releases), and Shadows of Doubt is emerging in something apparently like its true form. What emerges is a genuinely impressive engine for generating narratives somewhere between Raymond Chandler and Philip K. Dick, but riddled with errors and overlooked features that often leave me feeling more murderous than any of the suspects.

My review code was for the PS5, and while I can't speak to the integrity of Shadows of Doubt on other platforms, I can't imagine they could run it much worse. A full list of the issues I experienced would be near-endless, but I'll name a few for demonstrative purposes: The UI kept glitching, placing essential evidence off-screen or making it impossible to select basic menu options. Loading times were exhaustingly long, with minutes spent staring at a slowly moving bar. Certain weather effects caused the frame rate to drop to the level of a powerpoint presentation. At one point a physics error pushed me through the exterior wall of a tenth floor penthouse, and I woke up with two shattered legs and an extortionate hospital bill.

Errors like this weren't just common, they were constant, and quickly tempered my enthusiasm as I found myself fighting the game almost as much as I was playing it. On top of that, while the investigation mechanics are superb, a lot of the gameplay beyond them feels undercooked or ill-explained. Status effects like hunger or nausea are fine – this is an immersive sim – but apartment customisation is a dull and pointless exercise, the sandbox builder where you can create cities to play in was downright non-functional, It wasn't adequately explained how to arrest a perp (an integral mechanic), and the extensive list of storylines to pick from ended up just being one story and a narrative-free sandbox mode, the empty space in the menu speaking volumes.

The result is a stop-start experience that I can't imagine is the developer's intended vision, and certainly not suggestive of a game that's ready to leave early access. I'd hit a good sleuthing groove, snuffling out evidence and rummaging around filing cabinets with a flashlight held in my teeth, only for a glitch to push some vital document into a wall where I can't get it. Or maybe a status effect would curse me in perpetuity, even when I was specifically chugging the medication designed to cure it. I'm told that a Day One patch will solve many of the technical issues – I hope it does – but holy Columbo, it'll have to be a substantial one.

Laying out the case

I played a lot of Shadows of Doubt during its tenure in early access, and was pretty excited for the 1.0 release. And in a way I still am excited, because I don't feel like I've gotten the finished product yet. Right now it's barely holding together on a technical level, certain gameplay elements feel unfinished, too much goes unexplained and the one "narrative" available is just a string of disconnected investigations, followed by your character suddenly retiring and disappearing to a location we don't even get to see. Being told this is the finished form of the game… well, that's the hardest story to swallow yet.

And yet I do still have a lot of love and respect for Shadows of Doubt, despite my frequent frustration. The way it creates complete and cohesive mysteries can be truly awe-inspiring even now, to say nothing of the way that hundreds of citizens lead their nuanced, intertwined existences.

The true potential of this detective sim is limitless – but it just hasn't reached that point yet. Still, if you have more patience for fighting bugs than the cast of Starship Troopers, there's one of the most electrifying mystery games in years buried beneath all the jank.