Shadows of Ingenuity

 Murder, the AI wrote.

Bumping around the gaming market for so very long, I'm obviously painfully invested in every single trend, cliché and direction of the game market- what's popular, what's fallen off, who's making the innovation. And time after time it's becoming evident that the real systemic industry wide shifts of development are starting in the mad labs of insane indie developers who are rediscovering what it is to be 'inventive' and 'creative' with the games that they make. Stationed in small teams working with boxes of nuts and bolts and cobbling together Tony Stark's Mk 1 Ironman Suit to make the big industry players look over their shoulders and wonder what the heck it is they've been missing out on whilst circling around each other trying to out-copy one another. I mean, the last time a big company tried to be creative was probably... 'Watch Dogs Legion'- and that game... maybe it's a good thing that smaller companies are the one's who tend to be more experimental.

Of course, from what I can tell ColePowered games, the developers of 'Shadows of Ingenuity' aren't any fresh faced cub to the space of development; which is probably why they were so comfortable dedicating, in their words, several years to the creation of a game quiet unlike any other before or around it. 'Shadows of Doubt' is the experimental dream for a lot of armchair detective murder show watchers out there, or at least it hopes to be one day upon it's competition. What we have today is more of an alpha packed with the jank and bugs you would expect, but still hugely impressive even from where we are right now. The bugs are just enough that I haven't personally bitten the bullet, but I'm glued to watching content on it because this game just fascinates me.

The premise is thus: you are thrown into a lightly dystopian, softly sci-fi Cyberpunk, procedurally generated city populated with procedurally generated citizens and shops and explorable buildings. You are a nobody private investigator living their day to day in a location where someone, at some point, is going to get murdered. From that point it's up to the game's AI to decide who is killed, who did it and leave a trail of clues for the player to pick up on in a, say it with me, procedurally generated murder mystery! The tools available to the player are robust, is a little overwhelming at a glance, and the computer is fully capable of creating leads that head off nowhere- it's up to the resilience of the player to unearth the real killer before they kill again. And of course, to do it all again when the next killer is created because this is a live playable rendition of Murder She Wrote, generated in voxels.

In sheer scale alone the idea of this concept is immense. Huge playspaces with a stupid amount of residents that are all given documents detailing their roles and purposes for the player to shift through as they compare fingerprints, analyse connected social circles and fiddles around with their interactive 'murder board' to pick out the guilty party in a cast of potentially hundreds. Even the act of conceptualising the amount of algorithms and generation constraints that would have to be conjured up in order to not turn an idea like that into a total mess boggles the mind. But I've seen the systems in action- they genuinely seem to work and the result is one of the most interesting detective game concepts for a game that has ever existed. A must-play for 'L.A. Noire' fans already!

Of course, by now you know the special source I look for in my games, and despite how it sounds, Shadows of Doubt does a solid job building it's dystopian world around the player so that they slide right into it's cyberpunk-style megacorp trappings. There's no story per se, but the delightful tongue-in-cheek approach to depicting a world wherein private investigators rounding up criminals makes sense does just enough to provide that context which is neither too jokey nor too stringent for the player to make their own stories. This isn't just some impressive tech demo with little else put into it, there's artistic vision which helps push this just that bit further into being an interesting experience to play around with. There's a glint of Mirror's Edge here, for sure. 

Speaking of stories, it does tickle me how Shadows of Doubt has gone beyond the call of duty in order to throw in some side activities to keep the aspiring detective busy. From side hussle jobs they can take to make some money between the city-rocking murders, to an actual 'addiction' system to the various alcohols and megacorp synthesised products just for that extra bit of roleplay on top. There's a stealth system with camera hacking and lock picking, and you can even get in a tussle with the citizens if you get on their bad side (or get caught stealing their possessions to pawn off at the jewellers). And progression through the game can be marked quantifiably, through the curious 'Social Credit' system that increases with your good standing amidst the citizens (thus influencing their likelihood to actually answer when you come around asking questions), and materially; through the purchase of apartments to live in.

Yeah, I had to role my eyes a little bit at that last one. Just like every single game post Minecraft for about a decade, throwing in a crafting system so that players have to build their own houses from scratch can get old pretty quick. Heck, even 'Hobo: Tough Life' tasked it's players with cardboard house building- the gimmick morphs into a tired cliché right fast! But on the flipside, Shadow of Doubt kind of makes it work in it's janky way. It kind of makes sense for your dystopian roaming private investigator to start off on the streets, and work their way up to a dank apartment building under the boiler room of some laundrette or somewhere equally as demeaning. Like Saul Goodman, but with more moral compunction. Oh, and the actual 'home making' systems are rather quaint. Just a sweet little sprinkle on the side.

At this point it's hard to really know what to make of Shadow of Doubt beyond that it's a wildly impressive concept made into somewhat functioning reality. Given it's ambition I would expect an indie game like this to be spaghetti code trash- but so far I couldn't be further from the truth; the team have on their hands something genuinely special. I can't say for certain whether or not it actually has legs to go anywhere- I know the team have a roadmap to get it to a 1.0 release but I have no idea what the 'apex' version of this game looks like- and maybe that's what's so exciting about it. No one has ever done anything like this before so we can't reliably guess at what comes next, we just can be along for the ride as clueless as the next guy along. If AI integration in gaming is a coming inevitability, I want games like this to shape how they fit in.