It was a rainy day when she walked into my office, hard rain, like stray stones from a truck on the highway hitting your car bonnet. I lit my cyber-cigarette and put my feet on my desk, I don't know why, I thought it would make me look nonchalant to this strange woman. She wasn't impressed. "Detective," she said, glaring at me with eyes like gorgeous tennis balls, "I want to open today's advent calendar door." I was confused. "Whaddya wanna do that for, missy?" She sat back, relaxed, and pulled a gun from her purse. "I need to stuff a body into it."
]]>"Bestest best?! We’ll have that!" is how I imagine detective immersive sim Shadows Of Doubt made it on the roster for the Jingle Jam 2024 charity bundle. "RPS have never steered us wrong before!" they said, thus cementing our reputation as the most selflessly heroic gaming website, seven years running. What we can’t take credit for, however, is the 1.2 million quid they’ve raised already. If you want to make that number bigger, you can pick up the bundle here, and get 19 Steam keys for your trouble with a minimum donation of £35.
19 is such an annoying number in terms of the page layout that I’m almost convinced to never give to charity again, but there are some very nice games, including the aforementioned Shadows Of Doubt, Dungeons And Degenerate Gamblers, Citizen Sleeper, Another Crab’s Treasure, Two Point Campus, and Deathsprint 66.
]]>For years, a dangerous and charismatic game has evaded the grasp of many designers. Some say it doesn't exist, that no publisher would ever back it. I'm talking about the one city block RPG that Warren Spector has often mentioned. Sure, we've seen a few usual suspects already - Deus Ex Mankind Divided, Disco Elysium, even Else: Heart.Break - they all grimace in the line-up but nothing ever sticks. Now, out of the gloom of indie development, comes another perp ready to have his mugshot taken. Shadows Of Doubt is an open world detective sim that comes perilously close to being our guy. Its clothes, stature, gait, and fingerprints match the description of what Spector often describes. And yet, if you tilt your head, something is just a little off. The game isn't confined to one block. It's not an RPG precisely. And its simulation has plenty of bugs, jank, and unintentional comedy. But after all this time, in the absence of a smoking gun, shouldn't we just put this guy in the slammer and call the case closed? I say yes, let's. Officers! Arrest this game, it's brilliant.
]]>In Shadows Of Doubt you can fall from the roof of a corporate office building during a routine investigation, shatter all the bones in your frail detective body, wake up in a clinic fully healed, and then sprint out the door without paying your sky-high hospital bills while the clinic's auto-turret shoots at you for doing a medical dine and dash. The early access game is on our best immersive sims list for a reason, you know, and now it has an autumn release date for the final version, along with a new trailer.
]]>The immersive sim has seen a revival in recent years. Not only from larger studios like Arkane, keeping the faith alive with their time loops and space stations, but also from a bunch of smaller developers bravely exploring a typically ambitious genre. RPS has always had an affinity for these systemically luxuriant simulations, historically lauding the likes of the original Deus Ex as the best game ever made. But given everything that has come since, is that still the case? Only one way to find out: make a big list.
]]>A recent update for procgen whodunnit sim Shadows of Doubt added "Sharpshooter Assassins" with high-powered rifles to the game's glowering alternate-1980s cities, with players having to work out the killer's vantage point by deducing a bullet's trajectory, before proceeding to a secondary crime scene to search for a murder weapon and witnesses. The prospect of snipers certainly adds menace to the game's forensic sandboxing. The trouble is, the shooters aren't always as sharp as they could be.
]]>Revealed during yesterday's Triple-i Initiative, procedurally generated detective sim Shadows Of Doubt largest update yet is playable right now. Dubbed "The Sharpshooter Assassin", the the patch introduces two new killer variants, both snipers who'll blast lead from vantage points around the city. And the city's expanding too, with new uber-rich gated communities as well as a contrasting shanty town. Not to mention a new auto-travel feature that lets you wander about these spots and attend to some casework without pausing the game.
]]>Shadows of Doubt is the voxel-based 1980s detective sim in which the glass is always rain-slicked, the coffee as bitter as the human soul, and the whodunnits, procedurally generated. Hard-nosed private eye Rachel (RPS in peace) pronounced herself fascinated but a little stumped by it, back in April, while Graham described it as his "ideal game" in a post about the recent addition of infidelity cases and lost-and-found jobs, adding to my suspicions that Graham is some kind of jigsaw killer and that his news posts are actually ciphered confessions of his terrible crimes.
Well, these already viscous plots are about to thicken into a borderline-immobile soup of intrigue, for ColePowered Games are adding modding tools to the game. These will allow you to pen your own detective mysteries, and even alter the surrounding city to fit.
]]>Shadows Of Doubt is in many ways my ideal game: a procedurally generated detective sim set in an open, rain-slick noir city. I'm waiting for it to get further along in its Early Access journey, and to that end, its first major content update is here now.
The Cheats And Liars Update, as its called, adds new "infidelity cases" to investigate, alongside simpler lost-and-found side jobs.
]]>I honestly thought I was good at detective games until I started playing the early access build for Shadows of Doubt. I mean, I’ve riddled through The Case Of The Golden Idol’s intuitive fill-the-blanks whodunnits, wrestled with Return Of The Obra Dinn’s sixty missing persons, grappled with the mysteries of the very gods themselves in Paradise Killer, and don’t get me started on Danganronpa’s ridiculous mind-bending, patience-testing murder mysteries.
That being said, ColePowered Games' detective immersive sim has really left me stumped, forcing me to hang my deer stalker on a hat peg in shame and sling my detective's notebook out a window. Shadows Of Doubt is like no other detective game I've played, and although its murder mysteries have left me spiraling, I've had an absolute riot playing it.
]]>We’ve known about Shadows Of Doubt for a few years now, mainly peeking at it through Screenshot Saturday posts, which makes sense considering the game’s beautiful, neon-soaked voxel art. Happily, the open world detective sim is now sneaking into an early access release next month, on April 24th.
]]>Steam Next Fest is back with a veritable truck ton of fresh game demos to sample, and we've been plunging our eager little mitts into the latest batch of indie delights to unearth some handy recommendations for you to hit first. Running from now until February 13th, there are always oodles of demos to try in a Next Fest, so sometimes it's nice to have a helping hand in working out what's worth sinking your time into. Below, we've rounded up 16 of our favourites so far, and we'll be writing about plenty more demos we've yet to try over the coming week.
]]>Happy New Year, folks! Crikey, there are a lot of games coming out this year, aren't there? When I first asked the team to put together their most anticipated games for 2023, I was thinking we'd have a reasonably sensible number of things we were all looking forward to, you know, somewhere in the region of the 43 games we highlighted at the start of 2022. Very quickly, though, it became apparent that, actually, there are simply loads of games the RPS Treehouse is personally excited about this year, and cor, it would be rude not to include every last one of them. I'll be upfront: there are a fair number of TBA games on here that probably aren't going to come out in 2023, but as ever, we remain hopeful and optimistic all the same. So let's dive in.
]]>Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter's #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. Twitter is still alive, against all odds, so let's admire more indie games. This week, my eye was caught by a cute frogfishing scene, several handcrafted horrors, modular synths, and cryptid photography. Come see!
]]>Shadows Of Doubt invites skepticism. It's an open world mystery game set in a city in which every resident is simulated with daily schedules and routines, and it's developed largely by a single person. Shadows Of Doubt has also fought my skepticism so far with playable demos and, now, a new official trailer. It sure looks like it's doing the thing.
]]>Screenshot Saturday Sundays! Our weekly fishing trip through an ocean of game jams, prototypes and passion projects. After noticing a particular palette in my screenshot tenure thus far, I've decided to veto the colour orange this week. Had to be done, I'm afraid. Instead, we've got snowboarding simians, time-hopping detectives and a real blast from the past.
]]>I'm pretty sure each and every game developer in the world has considered making a game that exists within an unnecessarily large city. There are abandoned hard-drives, rammed with sketches and docs about making an open world and letting the player traverse it, taking missions that spill across streets and alleys and into tower blocks. You're just another face in the crowd, one with a job to do. There are obvious reasons why this sort of complexity stumps developers: it could be boring, it could break, it could be impossible. But I still want to play something like it, and this first look at noir-stealth detective game Shadows Of Doubt is encouraging.
]]>It’s a bit tricky to knock together a list of the best upcoming stealth games, because it’s a bit tricky to say what a stealth game even is anymore. Stealth is more frequently looking like a playstyle or bulletpoint rather than the crux of an entire game. Even the best stealth games in recent memory - yer Invisible Incs, Ian Hitmans, Alien: Isolations - have all layered their stealth within towering trifles of genre mashups. And that’s good! It just means we've had to flex the definition for this list.
Below, I’ve gathered together a few of the best upcoming stealth games that I’ve got my ridiculously over powered, patrol pattern-sensing eye on. Some of these aren’t strictly genre adherent, but all offer stealthy play as at least core element. Do feel free to suggest your own upcoming games in the comments.
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