Shadows of Doubt Review (Drifter)
This game has the unique ability to make me feel like I truly accomplished something. The unscripted, procedurally generated, cases have to be solved dynamically; this makes for an extremely rewarding game loop. This game has no audible voices, no sense of self, as you hardly know anything about the main character, yet somehow it is one of the most immersive titles I've ever played.
Let me explain, to the best of my ability why that is:
In a nut shell, the world exists. I could stop there, but I'll elaborate. The world exists...apart from you. What I mean by that is, that the world, it's denizens, and their personal lives, all exist apart from you.
For example, Brenda may live on the 11th floor of the building across the street from yours. She has an identity. She has a last name, fingerprints, a shoe size, a husband, a job, an inappropriate romantic relationship wit her co-worker. A phone number. She makes 48k a year, and was recently denied a raise. She frequents a Chinese restaurant a couple blocks from her house. She has migraines and is a meat lover.
This is all stuff that is true of her, and might not be true of anyone else. But the reason you're sneaking around her apartment collecting all of this data is because she sent an email to someone a few days ago, an angry email, threatening violence. She doesn't seem the likeliest of suspects, her shoe size doesn't match for instance, the perpetrator was a large size 13, and the victim was killed in a gruesome way, the body encircled by a bloody, demonic, pentagram, but it's the only lead you got. That is, until you discover a human skull in the end table near her bed, and next to it, a pair of men's shoes...size 13. Her husband's...Still that's not enough to go by. You quickly pull his full name off the lease papers they keep in their closet. Alfred Bennis. His business work schedule is pinned to the fridge. It appears Alfred works at Johnson Enterprises.
You decide to go to her husbands work place at night time to rummage through the employee records. You find Alfred's file, his finger prints, and a nice clear portrait of his face. You wonder if any of the victim's next door neighbors would recognizes him. Now that you have a picture you head back to the scene of the crime and knock on the door across the hall. An old woman answers, she comes across as a tight lipped lady who doesn't want to put her nose in other peoples business, but you insist, adding with your inquiry a few credits to persuade her to take a look at the picture. She confirms that she saw the man in the picture leave the apartment in a hurry, around 8pm.... An inspection of the victim's body had indicated an estimated time of death at between 7:40pm and 9pm.
BINGO! You have a suspect who was spotted at the scene of the crime, who wears size 13 boots, and is affiliated with the victim through his wife. Now, you could keep gathering evidence just to be absolutely sure. Hack into his emails, rummage through his locker at his work to see if you can find the murder weapon, see if you can find footage from street cameras that shows him stalking the victim.
Should you submit your case resolution, and find that you were WRONG...well, then you must have missed something. Were the size 13 boots even relevant? Didn't a cop with big feet go tromping through your crime scene before you got there? Did you ever check the trash at the victim's apartment for any evidence. Well, maybe, you'll get a second chance to catch the murderer after he kills next victim.... And next time, you'll be ready.
All of those personal details, connections, and forensic findings not only make the world more believable and immersive, it makes the cases more difficult to solve; you aren't fed leads that prompt pre-written dialogue, you don't have shining clues conspicuously glimmering on the bed. You have a massive haystack of data to comb through with your own deductive reasoning and an absolutely ingenious little evidence board to map out your connections and visualize your logic.
THE CASE BOARD
I could have written only about the case board. It is single-handedly my favorite part of the game. But let it suffice to say that I was struck by the innovative use of the case board system in a video game the same way I was struck by the Nemesis system in Shadows of Mordor. It made me ask the questions, why isn't this mechanic being used in way more games. Shadows of Doubt is onto something, I can't wait to see what more the developers do.