Early Access Review: Shadows of Doubt

destructoid.com:

Here’s what a great detective I am: I was playing Shadows of Doubt, walking through the city of Neo Misery on some sort of casework. I hear an altercation ahead of me and see this guy hit the ground. My first thought is that the guy is getting mugged. The person who did it tries to act naturally and walk away. I stop, look at the murder weapon and the guy’s wallet lying on the ground in front of his lifeless body, and then I continue on about my day. Just left the guy lying there in a pool of his own voxel blood.

It’s only later that I get a report about the murder scene and return to start my investigation.

Let me be clear that Shadows of Doubt can sometimes break in interesting ways and defy logic, but this wasn’t one of those moments. I witnessed a murder and decided it wasn’t worth interrupting my current task over. That was me being broken.

A lot of my time spent with the Early Access of Shadows of Doubt was spent praying that the game wasn’t breaking on me. Another good time was trying to take advantage of the broken parts of the game. Some more of it was spent trying to regain lost progress because Shadows of Doubt doesn’t warn you that you’ll lose unsaved progress when you quit. If you forgot to manually save, it will just let you lose everything since the last time you did. Save early, save often.

If that all sounds awful to you, hear me out. As it stands now, Shadows of Doubt is intriguing and has the potential of being amazing.

In the Early Access blurb, the developers state that Shadows of Doubt is “functionally complete,” which is both reasonably accurate and somewhat misleading. The core of the game is definitely in place. You play as a gumshoe dropped onto the streets of a procedurally generated city, and