Comment on Shadows Of Doubt emerges from the wet alleyway of early access with 1.0 release next month
CodexArcanum@lemmy.world 3 months ago
I’ve really enjoyed this game in EA but I’m curious to see what they add and where they go with it. Right now, there’s so structural flaws that to me hamper the long term repayability.
For one, the mechanics are all a bit junky and you do run into issues with dead-ends, missing evidence, or shit like the only way into the murder apartment is locked down and the snakey air vents go everywhere but the apartment you need, and so on. Because of that, you end up relying heavily upon a few mechanics that always work. Like everyone has a box in their house with all their personal details, and workplaces always have a filing cabinet with all the employees’ records in it.
So investigations mostly end up being lots of fingerprint scanning followed by some B&E and rifling through papers. Worse, if you stay on a smaller map for a while you can quickly build up a Crime-DB of every citizen in town which trivializes investigations.
Amazing game from a small studio though, I really hope they give it the polish and variety it needs to be a classic.