Just released in early access:
There’s so much discussion in the omnibus detective games thread, starting around here that this probably deserves a thread of its own.
Don’t any of you feel like you’re spoiling the game by playing early? Sounds like there’s more content to be added?
I don’t think it’s that kind of game. You might get tired of it, but there’s nothing to “spoil,” really.
There’s a capacity to have specific missions and cities, but the heart of the game is to be a procedurally generated detective game. So every time you play your investigation will be unique to you, so you can’t really spoil much other than the manner in which things are generated.
Or, to put it another way, it’s like saying you could spoil Dwarf Fortress by playing the original version Vs the latest.
I don’t know if a mod will chop out the old conversation and put it in this thread, but incase they don’t future readers should know it started here
I have a murder in my game that I just don’t know how to progress, so while I randomly bumble around hoping to accidentally figure out who did it, I’ve started to take on other jobs to pass the time and earn money to buy cigarettes.
One of them was a photo mission, so I went to city hall and bought a camera and then used the phonebook there to get the address of the person I was supposed to snap a picture of.
Once I have the picture I’m supposed to slide it under their neighbour’s door, which is weird, but whatever.
I went to the target’s apartment building and scanned their mailbox for fingerprints (“S” and “CI”) and then went upstairs and scanned their front door and found the same sets, which suggests there are at least two people living there, so I can’t just snap whoever comes out the front door and know it’s the right person.
Fingerprint “S” means I’ve already scanned their prints elsewhere, so I go back to the restaurant it was in and check the staff pictures on the wall in case the person I want works there.
Nope.
Either I’m looking for the person Print “CI” belongs to, or “S” was there as a customer.
I go back to the apartment and knock on the door. A woman answers (the name I’m looking for is gender-neutral, so I don’t know if this is them) . I ask them their name hoping to shortcut everything but they won’t tell me.
I show them a picture of my murder victim and ask them if they’ve seen that person - you know, just so the conversation won’t seem weird - and when they say no I suddenly bust out my camera and take a picture just to bring the weirdness back again all at once.
They slam the door on me.
I don’t want to submit this picture (under the neighbour’s door) because I don’t want to lose $100 for providing a picture of the wrong person. So I do the only sensible thing, which is go home and go to sleep until 3am and then come back and break into their apartment.
Their apartment building has cameras outside every door and I don’t really want to bring down the entire system, so instead I find some ventilation shafts two floors up and John McClane my way around to the central line, then down two floors and over to the relevant apartment.
The vent here opens horizontally instead of down into the room and everything is pitch black, so I can’t really see where I am. I turn the flashlight on briefly but all it shows me is a small circle of dimly lit ugly wallpaper.
I decide to go for it, click “Enter” and then fall out of the ventilation shaft right into the apartment’s shower. Where I come face to face with a dude taking a shower.
I scream in real life, but have the presence of mind to hammer “6” to bring out the camera. I snap my picture and then bail out of the shower and out of the bathroom… as I sprint through their living room the bedroom door opens and the woman from earlier appears in her underwear. I hit “6” again and snap a picture of her too.
Then I notice a wallet and a key on the stand next to me, so I grab both, sprint to the apartment door, unlock it and fly down the stairs.
Outside in the snow I open the stolen wallet and pull out the ID, so now I know that the woman is called Xi Qin, meaning the man was the intended target.
And what a weird target too! I mean, who takes showers at 3am on a Tuesday? I almost had a heart attack.
I open my evidence board to grab the photo of the dude in the shower and throw away the photo of the woman in her underwear and realise I didn’t pin either of them, so I don’t have them anymore.
New plan! Trigger the fire alarm and photograph whoever comes out!
God I love this game.
It’s not a spoiler in the traditional sense, but I do generally avoid EA even for systems based games, for fear that I will be done with the game before the best version of it is available. I’m not generally one to revisit games after my initial playthrough, with a tiny handful of exceptions (and forever games like sims). Mostly RTSes where I know I’ll be playing loads of short skirmishes over time.
I’m extremely keen to play this, but I’m not going to jump in until I know it’s more or less complete.
One thing I’ve learned is that I really need to make a mental map of where I am and where I’m headed before I start crawling through the vents. I surprised a few folks last night.
Apparently in the dark, no less.
Well, who knows what you will think the best version of a game is! @Rock8man wishes they would have stopped tinkering with Dead Cells ages ago.
Yeah, it’s complicated. Like Ginger_Yellow, I tend to not return to games, so I generally avoid Early Access. But these days they keep tinkering with games even after they hit 1.0 and radically changing them.
Dead Cells wasn’t the only one. Atomicrops kept tinkering and then radically changed the game design. I’m glad I got to play it at 1.0 before they completely changed the game at 1.4.
Maybe I’m missing out on that sort of thing in Early Access too. Maybe the best version of the game, “best” being the version that I would have enjoyed the most, was actually in Early Access. I know there’s people in the Don’t Starve thread who said there were versions of the game in EA where they thought the gameplay was best before they added more stuff to it.
Good point. I find this to be very true, as I “spoiled” myself on Dwarf Fortress, Factorio, Kerbal, Minecraft, so there’s a lot of later content for those games I’ve yet to see and perhaps never will.
However with Shadows of Doubt it’s so early on that I doubt I will be spoiled, similar to how the DF and Factorio “demos”/very early releases didn’t stop me from waiting until their was more content. In all cases (including SOD) I’m mostly dipping in now to see what it’s like and to keep me tantalised for EA period until it’s more mature.
Yeah, that’s probably how I’ll approach it as well: poke around and explore for a while, then put it down and circle back once it’s more complete.
I like it a lot. It’s like Thief simulator meets Deus Ex with a lot more engineering.
I’ve been replaying the tutorial several times because I’m not nearly patient enough to do the whole detective stuff properly, and I keep getting annoyed with myself. I have no trouble finding the killer, it’s pretty straightforward, but then I mess up on arresting “them”, and I decide to just start over and take a different route.
I managed to accidentally hack my own computer.
I couldn’t find anything with the code on it, so I just did the regular “1234” and abra cadabra, zim zalabim.
Now I’m on my third attempt of the tutorial investigation, and I just realized that the code is on the notice board in the living room.
I love it when games make me feel stupid like that.
With posts like this who needs marketing firms? Going to buy it now.
I used the codebreaker on my own safe, not realizing it was a one use item.
This game is a hoot, early access or otherwise. I had more fun playing the tutorial than I’ve had in many AAA games. Sure, it’s a bit janky, but somehow, things come together in a way that I’m forced both to use my brain and then use the sneaking, etc. to try to piece together what’s happening.
If you hold down Tab, you’ll see a map of your location and the vents, which helps a lot.
I’m sure I would love this game, but I just can’t get past the fact it looks like it was made in 1990. Why do developers insist on doing this? (That was rhetorical, btw)
I actually prefer it to the Unity-Asset-Store-Bland look of many Indie games. It says solidly on the non-lifelike side of the Uncanny Valley, which is better than trying for more realism and looking awful.
Anyhow…
It might be fun if people who have picked this up all generated a city with the same seed, for comparing stories/investigations/clues, etc.
Oh that’s a neat idea! I like it.
How do you this would work best? Nobody has “won” the game, so I don’t know how long a seed should last. Maybe we just create a separate topic with title like “Shadows of Doubt - Seed 1 - Berlin City” (or whatever city name). Then we can later decide when another seed needs to be created?