Shadows of Doubt Review (Messiah⭕⃤)
As much as I like this game a lot, I can't recommend it in its current state and based on the pacing of the development so far. I have owned this game for at least half a year now and have seen nothing of substance really added.
The main issue with this game is, there is a lot of window dressing and not a lot of substance here. The dev seems more interested in expanding things like... in world TV drama series... VS adding things like... expanding forensics, expanding clues, expanding missions in an actual clever way, adding more buildings to the world, dialogue, fixing the awful UI and so on.
Let me paint the picture of the SoD experience. You first load up the game and you are awe-struck. You have this amazing atmosphere, you are bombarded with information, potential leads, clues... you get your first murder case! So exciting. You go in and look around. Notice the vic submitted a police report about being stalked... go to see if you can look at the report - doesn't exist. You read through the emails, an email suggests that he was upset with a co-worker... you check out the lead - irrelevant filler mail. You check the camera system during the time of death... no one is on camera during this time. Your vic has a spouse, surely they talked to their spouse about being stalked - didn't see or hear anything unusual.
- You begin to realize that 95% of the game is just clutter and filler, and your instinctual investigative skills will almost always lead you on a wild goose chase either following what you think are leads but are actually very misleading filler emails, or looking for something that doesn't exist in the game. You start to realize that the core of the game is to take this fingerprint and match it to every person that the vic knew and here are some clues to narrow down that search. This is pretty much true with the side missions as well, just with a slight twist on what you actually have to do.
I do have to say that the fingerprint system is absolutely fabulous, but that seems to be the only thing that is actually fleshed out.
What this game needs is a major expansion to the forensics side of the game... give me blood splatter. A reason for blood type. Let me find shoes that have had blood. Let me find blood that has been cleaned up. Let me find hair. Let me look for signs of a break and enter. Trophies for serial killers. Evidence and paper trail of a purchased murder weapon. Signs or evidence of the killer suggesting murder to a bartender, a spouse, or a colleague. Spousal murder case. Criminal records that are relevant to the case. Police reports that actually exist. Emails that actually make sense to the case. I want more ways to solve murders and compensate with harder cases. I don't need everything all in 1 case, but I want more variety here. Also, remove the government database... this is literally a cheat code. If you want something like that, have it be like, you can bribe a specific officer that can give you a lineup of possible fingerprint matches, with vague information after like a certain level. It is dumb you can just free access all information about everyone. The other thing that needs majorly implemented is a proper dialogue system. It is so annoying not being able to actually question people about anything. Like I want to be able to test for alibis, I want to ask people if they saw anything weird and to actually have people see stuff weird, I want to be able to question the spouse, collegue or witness. Get rid of misleading emails like "Let's secretly meet here" "Why are you dealing on my turf?" "my boss is upset with me", the number of times I thought these were clues indicating the vic was dealing drugs which led to his death, or was upset with the boss, or was having an affair, only to realize these have absolutely nothing to do with the case is annoying. Finally, if you are up to it. More building variety.
One final gripe... the UI is such a pain to use. Why is there a button I have to click in the UI to drop something. Why do I need to see every colour when I edit a clue. Why is the map such a pain to use. The UI really needs to be streamlined, simplified and cleaned up. Especially the inventory part.
This game has so much potential if the devs could just focus on adding actual substance to the core gameplay loop of the game. They nailed the atmosphere, the npc gen is amazing, and there are more than enough world items... but like I said so much of it is just window dressing and every case has the exact same formula to solve - give or take a few steps. I will say the kidnapping case was a fresh new addition, but it seems they didn't think it through much, cause the most reliable way to solve this is literally to buy a briefcase and arrest the kidnapper at the drop location. Get the location of the person kidnapped. And done.
It has been half a year since I bought this game, and almost nothing has actually changed about it. I really hope the devs focus and prioritize and aim to expand the area that matters instead of getting sidetracked on superfluous things that don't add gameplay to the game.