Outside there's a world of bars with broken neon signs, where inside you can quiz the bartenders or ask to see their records. People stick to their own schedules, and even on the way down from your room you'll see signs of a world that's alive and lived in - there's grubby wallpaper in apartment lobbies, where you can take dark stairways and brush against some of the city's citizens or catch a ratchety old lift. Their own apartment is a handful of blocks away, and on the journey between the two you discover how convincing Shadows of Doubt's procedurally-generated streets are. There's neat detail there, and a world that's convincingly grounded - instead of finding on-the-nose diary entries, here you'll just come across a tenancy agreement and a phone directory, the latter being put to use as you begin on the trail of a character whose case you're on. You start off in your own bed, crawling out then fumbling through a fog of amnesia as you slowly rediscover your own apartment. The tutorial level doesn't reveal Shadows of Doubt's full hand, but it does give a tantalising glimpse of it. It's fuzzy and gritty - the perfect texture for a detective thriller. The art-style is exquisite, a lo-grade pixellated affair that sits perfectly with the subject at hand. Okay, let's put a bit more effort in - Shadows of Doubt is a first-person detective stealth game set in a procedurally-generated noirish city. So what exactly is it? Allow me to do the lazy journalist scum bit with a quickly-dashed-together comparison - Shadows of Doubt is like Thief in a trenchcoat and with a ketamine hangover. I've played 20 minutes and I'm simply staggered. The biggest one rattling around my brain right now, though, is how is this possible? This is a work of staggering ambition and no small amount of artistry, presenting an evocative, fully-functioning cityscape for you to explore, complete with several intricate systems underpinning your sleuthing. You can't have a good detective game without a good mystery, and Shadows of Doubt has plenty of them. You can find more details on exactly what's going on over here, and we'll be bringing you more write-ups over the coming days. We're taking Rezzed online over the next few days, presenting sessions and bringing you highlights of what's new and interesting in the world of independent games.
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