Shadows of Doubt
This week, The Hourglass welcomes a guest blog from video game writer Jack O’Connor, about a game of special interest to fans of hardboiled detective fiction. Be sure to visit Jack’s Introverted PVP blog for more gaming views and opinions.
Shadows of Doubt is the Only Open World Game
I was hiding in the air ducts suspended over the wandering Yanis Price as he came home from his night shift as the chief of police of Stank Sock City. And even though this city was composed of hard rectangles and fuzzy voxels, and Yanis was blindly bumping into walls like a Roomba trapped under the bed, I had a sobering revelation occur to me. I was on the 13th floor of only one of the apartments that littered the 9 x 12 city grid that Shadows of Doubt had generated for me. A fully realized, fully explorable, randomly generated city composed of streets, back alleys, businesses, and hundreds of NPCs. I knew this suspicious bastard’s name! I knew he had a hearing aid and worked 08:00 to 23:00 so I couldn’t help but feel bad for him. This janky mess of pixels meant more to me than any other dynamic encounter found in any open-world game I’ve ever played. For the first time, I feel like I’ve entered a world.
Shadows of Doubt is a first-person detective immersive sim set in a randomly generated city in which you are a private eye tasked with solving murders, corporate espionage, and even the occasional beat down. What differentiates it from its counterparts is the honestly overwhelming amount of variables and options. It’s on you to manage your evidence, decide what’s important, and MOST importantly, how you track this information down. This is where the meat of the game is. Maybe you’ve used your fingerprint scanner and discovered that an unknown pair of prints found in the victim’s house belongs to an unknown suspect. Maybe you broke into the building’s security room and rewound the surveillance tape to see who left the apartment around the time of the murder, so you show the picture around town to the NPCs and hopefully find a lead. The world truly is your oyster. And I don’t believe that I can think of a genre that suits the open-world formula better than “The Detective Game.”
What Shadows of Doubt nails without question, is the immersive feeling of being Robert B. Parker’s Spenser, or Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden. You’re a private eye, and you’ll need to operate outside of the law. You’re not allowed inside crime scenes or a private business and it’s up to you to figure out how you’re to bypass coworkers and police alike. The world comes to life in these moments when you’re chasing a lead and need to pass the time until they leave their shift or come home. You can get a drink at a bar or a diner and wait it out there because you’ve got to manage your hunger, thirst, and temperature. The city is cold and if you don’t find a place to warm up, you’ll discover that precise tasks are rather difficult when you’ve got an uncontrollable shiver. These mechanics allow the noir roleplay to serve a great function and I found myself channeling my inner Bogart and winning over witnesses by buying them drinks or getting lucky with my character’s charm. It’s these mechanics that make this pixeled world come to life with more than any of its counterparts.
You see, an open world can be staggering in its scope, like No Man’s Sky with its 18 quintillion planets, or Red Dead Redemption 2’s faithful and historically accurate recreation of the American South. However, both of these examples come with their limitations, primarily the player's interactivity with the world itself. Sure, Red Dead’s NPC interaction is top of the line, however, when exploring the towns or cities, it can be easy for the immersion to begin to break down. Like real boomtowns quickly built and abandoned, Red Dead’s cities are mere facades. Beautiful ones, painstakingly realized, but still not something that you can entirely explore, and even the many houses and dens that the game does let you dig through like the nosy neighbor psychopath that you are, there’s still a level of futility to it as all you come away with are a handful of classic oatcakes and another pack of cigarettes you’ll forget to smoke.
There’s no doubt that open-world games have become the standard fair for most triple-A releases. You can’t open your game launcher without being beaned with a banner ad for the next open world. However, the irony is that as open worlds have grown in popularity, they’ve begun to plateau in their ingenuity. At the time of writing, open-worlds have built a box around themselves, acting for the most part as a schizophrenic double album. Disc one is the story: a linear path, occasionally littered with binary choices. In the story, you are no longer the driver, but rather the passenger, and exploration is locked up as you’re taken on a tour of whatever setpiece is in store. You tend to follow NPCs, participate in long slogs across the world as dialogue plays out, and usually close off with a token combat encounter. Disc two is the sandbox. You’re free from your mission and now it's time to dick around. The world is open for the player to explore and use their abilities to ultimately do one of two things:
Find a fight.
Find an item that will help you fight
Games of late have gotten very comfortable with this formula. Even the current open-world titans like Elden Ring or recent Legend of Zelda games follow this to a T. While they may let linear storytelling take a backseat, a wise move for a game that leans so heavily on exploration, the simple two-step cycle still dictates what you’re doing with every playthrough.
Of course, there are exceptions. And to me, this exception is Shadows of Doubt. It's the only game in this genre that feels worthy of its scope. The world opens before you and it's not a universe, it’s not a country, nor a realm. The city speaks for itself. It’s populated with a fixed number of citizens. They’ll brush past you as insignificant blurs, that warehouse might just bleed into the skyline. Those street vendors may appear as mere set dressing. It isn't until you carve your path that you begin to see through it all. You’ll recognize names, and memorize businesses, the narrative is unraveling and creating itself before you. The world may feel small at first glance, but its depth is tickling the taint of the Mariana Trench.
Without mincing words, Shadows of Doubt is the greatest experience I’ve had in an open-world game. The feeling of gazing out into the rainy streets and knowing that the killer you’re hunting is there – somewhere, right now, and the only thing holding you back is your own stupidity, is an unparalleled feeling. It’s a world that doesn’t just beg you to explore it but outwardly requires you to do so. It’s cohesive and lived-in, and with enough hours plugged into a single save, the world flairs to life to familiar places and routines. Suddenly this alley, or this diner carries a new significance that goes beyond grinding up power or experience for your character. Familiar faces will resurface, and you’ll know the ins and outs of every business. Eventually, the city becomes yours and I’ll be damned if Yanis Price is going to get away with this murder. Stank Sock City deserves a better chief of police.
I cannot recommend this enough. Especially if you’re someone like me who is feeling open-world fatigue, dive in and start solving some cases. The unapologetically open-ended design might make you a bit dizzy, but once you get your sea legs, you’ll find it very hard to return to much else.
He typed as Cyberpunk 2077’s Phantom Liberty wept.