Note: Review based largely on playing a campaign on the default city and starting with the Dead of Night tutorial case

When I first heard about this game, I have to say I was intrigued. There was a DOS game I played a LONG time ago called The President is Missing dropped you into the mystery and let you just approach the solution from any angle and gave you free reign to try to find the information from databases and making queries to agents to look into things for you. I had been looking for a mystery game that scratched that same itch for me and I had tried a lot of games that I thought would do so, and I just never able to recapture that feeling... until I played this game. (Her Story was one of the other games that I would bring up when talking about that feeling)

The problem I've had with other games in this genre is you are expected to solve the mystery in a very particular way and if you do not see the case in the exact way the devs has laid it out or the logic of their puzzle, you are going to have trouble solving it, and with Shadows of Doubt, because it is a sandbox and procedurally generated, you have a lot of different routes to getting to the solution of a particular case, which gives the player a lot of avenues to investigate, which makes each case feel more organic and I like that feeling.

You are in a world with hundreds of other characters, each with relationships, jobs, habits and as you investigate cases, you start to recognize the people around you, making each discovery you make potentially helpful later on, you recognize them around town, and things start feeling more and more alive as you learn more about your fellow citizens.

And because of the design, you can investigate in any direction you want, and as one of the loading screens says, if you are willing to put in the work or face the consequences, there is no room on the map that is truly off limits to you, so wherever an investigation takes you, you can follow up on it.

And I have to say, when you are stuck on a tough case, and you have a breakthrough and it all falls into place after that... it just feels exhilarating. I've also had a major case that I solved by happenstance while I was doing a sidejob which, given how the game is designed, also felt satisfying because in the real world, cases get solved like that as well.

After I was deep into the game, I watched a couple of Twitch streamers play the game as well and it was interesting watching how they tackled cases in entirely different ways than I would have approached them, which is also a huge selling point to me. It also allowed me to see some of the mod content which does seem to add some additional flavor to the game.

Is Shadows of Doubt perfect? No. There are some glitches, a bit of jank, and a few things I would love to see it do in terms of functionality and flavor in the vanilla version, but for the things I wanted it to be, it just hits all the right notes for me. I am looking forward to the work that is going to be done on this game in 2025 and beyond based on the current roadmap, but I wholeheartedly recommend this game in its current state. It is the game I wanted it to be.