https://www.pcgamer.com/games/sim/shadows-of-doubt-the-procgen-private-eye-immersive-sim-is-leaving-early-access-next-month/
I've never been more excited to scan fingerprints.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/18591054
I have to try it again, the first time I tried I didn't understand anything or what I was suppose to be doing.
If my experience is anything to go by, you mug everybody you see, steal everything in their wallet to “identify them”, interrogate them while vomiting drunk in their apartment, and maybe solve a murder or two on accident.
IMO it's not ready for getting out of early access.
Most of the time crimes are exploitable because NPCs life and assassination patterns are repetitive.
For 20-30h it's cool. After that you have already learnt all the possible exploitations and it becomes power gaming gameplay.
If you don't believe, search for steam reviews with more than +30h.
Yeah, people are either spoiled or deluded with games needing to be 100+ hours, especially cause those hours are often padded with garbage.
Shadows of doubt gives you at least 10-20 hours of hilarious procedural generation that actually hangs together as an immersive sim. You start to see the seams pretty quickly but by the time that happens you're digging into the actual mechanics. Also the devs take their time on updates but the last update was pretty huge so they obviously have a pretty big scope for the game.
replayability seems like the big advantage of something procgen like this though, independent of price. otherwise, why isn't it just a story curated by the dev?
I think both things can be true at the same time. 30h of gameplay off a $20 game is a very reasonable proposition. At the same time, not managing to translate the procgen core mechanic into - if not infinite then - better replayability is absolutely a flaw. Some will see the procedurally generated content part and hope for something to sink hundreds of hours into, so it's a fair warning.
I don't even have time to finish games longer than 10 hours in reasonable time. 20-30 hours of gameplay and not ready for getting out of early access? Waat?
I think it depends on the amount of fun you have. There's a difference between "I grinded for 30 hours to get this item, I felt pulled into doing it and now I'm 6 hours late for work" addictive fun, "I played for 30 hours on and off, it was such a relaxing experience" chill tf out fun, and "I played for 30 hours, I broke my controller from gripping it too hard and my heart was pounding the whole time" hardcore action fun. It's tough to gauge a game just on how much time it takes to complete.
I really like the regression of graphics trend lately. It enables the developers to focus in on gameplay, mechanics, and building the world. Personally, I love the style. It reminds me of PS1 days in so many ways.
I love this game. But there is a bug that causes some missions to be unsolvable. They really need to fix that before releasing it fully...
I'm pretty sure some of them are objectively broken. I had a mission where the mission givers partner was seeing someone else and I had to figure out who. The process of figuring out who the person was was pretty cool. Outside of some vague physical traits my leading clue was the mystery persons partners job position. I had to look up every restaurant, break into every single restaurant, find all the people who worked that position, find where they live, break into their apartments to find who their partner was and if they match who I'm looking for.
Eventually I was 99% sure I got the right person, but I needed proof they were seeing each other. I combed their entire apartment, found nothing. I combed the partners apartment, found nothing. I checked their workplaces, found nothing. I tailed both of them the entire day, still found nothing. I even checked their mailboxes and found nothing. I literally ran out of ideas how to solve the case because I found nothing.
Turned me away from the game because I got this cool investigation with some really out the box thinking, and then didn't get rewarded because I didn't find that last piece of information.
I had one which turned out to be the cop that did it. I have no idea if that was intentional or a bug but it was certainly funny.
I actually like these sort of boxes graphics, another game that has them is Cloudpunk; for reason I feel like the voxel graphics fit the world.
Jesus, now there is an old memory. "Portrait of the sleep deprived." Thanks for the trip down the lane, friend!
I bought SoD a while ago, and while I dont regret it, its gotten worse and worse. I use a laptop for everything, gaming included. The game has gone from running at a steadyish 30 fps (which is totally fine and usable, I don't understand high fps people) to being an unstable mess that maaaaaybe hits 20 fps if I stand still.
Even ignoring the gameplay issues, this game needs WORK.
It was already bad at the beginning. Never improved. Also, there seems to be no plan for a community driven mission system, so you can only play weird auto-gen ones.