Take a step back from what you spend much of your time doing in video games, and you may be hit with the fleeting epiphany that it’s all a bit, well,psycho, isn’t it? Mass shootings in online games, running around corridors that look like cervical canals, gunning down lots of goons while making chirpy little quips like Drake in Uncharted.
And yet, despite all these games forcing us into behaviours that wouldn’t exactly fly in regular society, I think that breaking into someone’s apartment, hiding under their bed, and waiting until they’re asleep before trying to get their fingerprints is one of the most quietly psycho things I’ve done in a game. What makes it weirder is that I didn’t actuallyhaveto do this—the game didn’t force me, and there were a thousand other ways I could’ve achieved my goal—yet for a good hour I got obsessed with trying to pull off this fingerprint theft, quickloading every time I got caught.
That’s what I’ve been up to inShadows of Doubt, the jaw-droppingly detailed and open-ended detective sandbox game that launched into Early Access last month. The game throws you into procedurally generated sandboxes simulating a chunk of city, with hundreds of civilians going about their daily lives, office blocks, apartment buildings with dozens of homes in each one, bars, clubs, chemists, you-name-it. It’s like if Deus Ex was all about detective work instead of cool android abilities and shady conspiracies.
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As a more or less anonymous detective, you pick up murder cases, then investigate them in just about any way you see fit. You can go around bribing people to loosen lips, rummage through rubbish bins for old receipts that let you track the movements of a victim or suspect, analyse surveillance footage; there really is a ton of relatively above-board ways to go about your investigation.
And yet here I am, hiding under the bed of the suspect, having broken into her apartment through a network of ventilation shafts that connects every apartment in this 18-storey building, listening for her snores to make sure she’s definitely asleep before pouncing with my fingerprint scanner, which I’m almost certain will confirm her as the culprit of the crime.
Old immersive sim habits die hard, as I instinctively went looking for the nearest vent so I could break into the apartment.
How did I get to this point? Well, upon arriving at the crime scene I confirmed the time of death, then saw that the last phone call at the apartment occurred shortly beforehand, with someone called ‘Violet.’ At the scene, I discovered fingerprints other than the victim’s in sus places like the safe (which was open) and near the body. Once I found Violet’s address in the victim’s phone book, I decided to head over there. Even if she didn’t commit the crime, she clearly knew the victim and as the last person to speak to him, may know something of his fate.
Once I arrive at Violet’s apartment complex, I ask around the neighbours first to see if they’d seen her, and they indeed confirm that she lives in the building. I knock on her door, but it’s answered by a man who refuses to tell me whether he knew Violet or not. I think about just socking him, barging into his apartment, socking her, then grabbing her ‘prints off her unconscious body, butno, dammitI want to do things properly! There was once a time where I’d brute-force situations like this, but this a detective game, and I want to play it like a detective… even if I don’t do thingsquiteby the book.
So with the door slammed in my face, I first scan the door for fingerprints and…it’s a match. Alongside prints presumably belonging to the rude dude, there’s another set of prints that match those at the crime scene. Now all I have to do is confirm that they do indeed belong to Violet, and it’s checkmate.
Those old immersive sim habits die hard, it seems, because I instinctively went looking for the nearest vent so I could break into the apartment. I had no idea what I’d do once I got in there (the thought of just beating everyone up certainly crossed my mind), and it was only when I snuck in through the bedroom vent and hid under the bed until who I suspected to be Violet came in to have a nap, that the ingenious idea to scan her finger as she slept crossed my mind. Ilivefor these kinds of improv moments in games.
The problem was that her insufferable partner kept barging into the room every time I tried this, kicking up some emotionally intense conversation (the dialogue is written, popping up above characters’ heads) that clearly neither Violet nor I wanted them to have. After 10 or 15 quicksaves, I finally managed to get lucky, grab the fingerprints (which were, of course, a match), and left through the vent whence I came.
But as it turned out, I would never make it to City Hall to file my crime report. After spending several minutes utterly lost in that rabbit warren of vents, I landed in someone else’s apartment, and couldn’t escape because the door was locked, and proceeded to have the shit beaten out of me by a particularly angry couple. I tried escaping through the vent, but the ceiling was too damn high, and I ended up feeling like a puppy trying to scramble out of a well filled with pythons.
Maybe next time I’ll just try getting the fingerprints from the suspect’s place of work…
Despite the mishap, my disastrous investigation was an awesome experience, generated through a mix of smart procedural generation and the spirit of creativity and improvisation that a good immersive sim evokes in me. The simulation is definitely still quite patchy at this point (my investigation would’ve gone much better if Violet actually went to work, like she kept saying she would), but the potential here is vast, and I could see this detective sandbox becoming one of my favourite games once it reaches its final form.
