RomanQrr
Inconsistent Consistency
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- Nov 17, 2019
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So... I recently found a game I wanted to boost the visibility of. But the idea of just telling the people about the game in a straightforward way seemed lacking in desired impact. So I thought I'd write a short story of my experience of the game through the eyes of the character I've played. Something like 3 or 4 Discord messages, not a big deal. Maybe just add a bit of in game lore for flavor. And invent some additional lore because I haven't completely read the in game books. And add the drama from the tutorial's flavor text. And...
It's now 12 Google Doc pages. It's also finished. Take a look at your own risk.
TL;DR: On 24th of April a game by the name of "Shadows of Doubt" entered early access. https://store.steampowered.com/app/986130/Shadows_of_Doubt/
It has many semi-game-breaking bugs, lag issues, and lacks some features. But what is already there is impressive as heck, and the dev actively patches all faults they can.
But I won't explain what the game is. I won't sing its praises. No, I will show you the core of the game the best way I know how: with a story.
—
Our story begins on a chilly 2nd of January of 1979. Appleton Springs - an overgrown oil rig that dares to call itself an arcology. A 3 by 3 city block jutting out of the rising ocean. Most food is replaced with synth analogs, sunlight is hard to come by, the weather changes from downpour to hale on a whim. Moreover, through legal loopholes and down right bribery, this country now welcomes our new glorious president: Starch Kola.
With a radical new regime comes radical new changes. Who needs competent police detectives when the president can simply expand its corporate security staff? That's how I found myself on these New Years: out of the job, deep in debt, and… Sam left…
Don't remember much of Jan 1st, nor the first half of the 2nd. When I came to, I was far from home, the rain soaking the front of my coat. I had to do something. Couldn't just sit still and wait. 100 crowns in my pocket, my trusty fingerprint scanner, and the Gumshoe aug - all I had going for me.
Guess it's time to try my hand at the whole "Private I" thing.
Don't remember where I got that first job. If I had to guess, it probably was the Admiral - a diner in the South-Western corner of this hellhole. A single-story eyesore compared to 10+ floored skyscrapers of the most of the city. But for one reason or another I always end up there when my feet ain't looking.
Besides the best god damned fried chicken and the only passable coffee, Admiral has this payphone cubby. Most food places have them. A great place to find the city's address book. But also a nice place to put up a note or 3. Usually it was something silly. "Selling vintage smoking pipe, used." "Basement apartment for sale. Bring your own pumps." "Feeling lonely? Call me."
But now? Now there wasn't a darn empty spot on that wall. 9 listings, most of them cries for help. For a given definition of "help". "Need a guy to trash an apartment." "Someone stole my expensive wine!" (and Enforsers don't do anything went unsaid) "We need a discrete individual for some… sensitive work."
One of them stood out to me: "Need a photo of a certain person. 900 crowns reward. Call [phone number]." For the love of me can't remember the digits. Always been my Achilles heel. Seemed like a simple job. Would have to buy a camera and there goes all my money, but the job seemed simple, quick, and painless.
And for the most part? It was. Cus it ain't the job that was the problem.
It was the gunshot I heard while doing it.
—
After jumping through the hoops the client thought would make them anonymous (they weren't, I had their fingerprint and the flat they requested the drop off to - more than enough for someone like me to shine some spotlight if I wanted to), I finally got the actual details. Specifically, the target's fingerprints and that they lived on the 10th floor of Andrews Towers. Small world. Sam's- My apartment is on the 3rd.
Not wanting to climb up all those stairs I opened the death cage mistakenly called an elevator and pressed the 10 button. Left along with my thought I focused on the noise the darn thing was making. And that's when
BANG!
A gunshot. Something high caliber, not those peashooter pistols. Wasn't really paying attention to which floor I was at, nor where exactly the shot came from. Broadly speaking 4th to 7th floors. I let my Gumshoe come to life, the relative time slowing down to a crawl. 18:31 on 01/02/79. I note it down, pin to my "Random" case board - pays well to have a place for random scraps of useless info to go to.
And then I completely ignored it.
Not my job, not my problem. I already bought the 85 crown camera - disposable, 10 or 15 shots, I think? Either way, handcuffs cost 50 to my 15, perp probably already hid in the crowd by now, and the damned lift doesn't stop mid movement. I was going to the 10th floor wherever I liked it or not. Plus it could also have been a simple accidental discharge, right? Right?
The cage opened and I carefully extricated myself from its deathly clutches. The usual Andrews Towers landing stared me in the face: a giant hole in the middle, flanked by 4 flats. There is never rhyme or reason for how the apartments are numbered on the floor, the landlord probably just slapped the last digits at random and called it a day. At least all of them are installed correctly - the idiot at Downs Grove has more than a few numbers installed backwards, mirrored and everything.
I pulled out the brick with the handle that is my fingerprint scanner. Were it not for how fragile the darn thing is, it would make a great blunt weapon. Sadly this is probably the last one I'll get, with the whole "not a policeman no more" thing. No James to yell at me for "breaking yet another one of the tax payer's expensive-ass thingimijigs!' Gotta make this one count.
This was a trick I learned in my rookie years. You would think that to get a print off of people you'd need to get into their homes or walk up to them and ask them "nicely". Both of those have chances of going not the way you'd want them to. But there is one thing no one can bar you from searching.
The front doors.
As it turns out most people need to touch their front door to go out of their apartment, all the while having little reason to touch other's. That means you can get a good idea of what prints live behind each door. But it gets even better. You see, people usually lock their doors. Doors that from inside the flats open outwards. That means that by knocking and having a person answer, that person is likely to leave fresh prints while unlocking on the inside of the front door. The side that they present to you by opening it.
Didn't have to resort to that trick, the prints of the target were easy to find. 1004th apartment, probably lived with someone else, given the density of the other party's prints. That complicated things. Were they alone, I'd just knock on the door, snag a shot and be gone in 20 seconds. As it stands I would have to learn more about them, probably break in, look for their workplaces and names, correlate their prints with identity somehow. Still would be a good idea to scan the other 2 doors, as the print might've been just from a neighborly visit (it wasn't, I checked).
But before I could even think of that, my Gumshoe fired up with a familiar radio ping.
"There've been a murder at 604 Andrews Towers. Perpetrator unknown. New case is open."
—
Let me explain the whole idiocy of the Enforcer program that our presidential overlord Starch Kola has plunged our law enforcement into in their great wisdom. Not only have they fired or demoted all of the experienced (and inexperienced) detectives. Not only have they hired the most idiotic goons to pose as Enforcers. Not only have they made it illegal to doubt that the Enforcers might do a great job (which is why you haven't heard this from me).
But they also completely failed to replace the old police systems with anything even remotely different.
Which means that I still get my old radio pings as the homicide detective.
Good old reliable Gumshoe immediately created a new case board for me to haphazardly fill with barely structured information. An old rush of curiosity joined up with a tinge of exasperation. I heard the shot. I know exactly when the murder happened. 18:31. With the cameras all over the place? Should be a cake walk.
It is at that moment that I realized that I'm going to find that killer just to spite them.
Still, no need to rush. The Enforcers will be all over the flat in just a few. Morons or not, I'm not a detective no more - no clearance for me to be there. But you know what they say. "It ain't a crime if you ain't caught." Just have to wait for them to finish, then swing by and explore the empty rooms. Might as well scan the rest of these 10th floor doors while I'm at it.
—
It is a lesser known fact, but the air vents that pierce the buildings like holes do cottage cheese are not actually that deadly. Take it from a duct rat like me: you can survive for whole minutes in there! And while yes, it does get a bit (a lot) chilly, it's actually a great way to get in and out of the places you ain't supposed to be in.
That was why I was perched on top of an open door in the victim's bedroom a couple of feet away from the crime scene at around 19:20 while somebody was walking around down there. No idea who that was either, probably an Enforcer, but I think I caught a glimpse of their outfit - didn't look like Enforcer garb to me!
Granted I was a bit distracted. First the victim's phone rang just as I was climbing under the floor. Potensial taunt from the killer? A worried partner wondering where the victim was? A wrong number? Either way it was a lead I could explore. Which probably didn't matter given I would just take the information from cameras.
Second and more pressing? The vent I entered through was of a ceiling variety. How's that relevant? Well, an average wall vent was positioned just high enough to be out of the way while also being reachable by, I don't know, a smug ex-detective with a talent for sleuthing without any extraneous help. You just walk up to one, open it up, pull yourself in. Not easy per say, but definitely doable.
But the ceiling ones? Those things are the spawn of the devil, and I don't even believe in the devil. They are always just out of reach no matter how hard you jump from the floor. You have to find something to climb onto. Those plastic stools that are usually around all over the place work well for that. But dropping somewhere where some people might decide to start shooting if they spot you? Kinda hard to look for one, much less position it properly. And so, after years of getting into trouble because of that, I learned one thing: ceiling vents are always a one way trip.
Which is funny in context because this one… wasn't. At least at the moment. It just so happened that the door to the bedroom when opened into the bedroom positioned itself perfectly under the vent. Hence why I was perched on top of it after entering the flat.
Lights were sadly on, so I dared not drop down. The switch was out of my reach on the other side of the doorframe. Thinking carefully I looked around the room, finally realizing where the light was coming from. I listened, meandering footsteps could be heard in the distance. I had no idea if they were watching the doorway, but there was no way to learn more. Time was running out, the prints getting stale with every passing second. I had to do something.
And so, with a twist of a lightbulb, the bedroom was plunged into darkness. And no one even noticed.
—
The victim ended up being one Frederick Bess. Worked at Yao's Chemical Systems (another low-story eyesore diametrically opposite the Admiral) as a security guard. Lived together with one Kanye Ukah, who in turn worked at Mint Tech - one of numerous do nothing offices in the city. I could've given you their blood type, date of birth, even shoe size - don't have the entry no more. Gumshoe runs out of memory fast.
Frederick was killed by a single buckshot discharge into their abdomen. Not sure if the shot was just that close range or what, but didn't find other pellet holes around. Speaking of around - there was a circle around the victim's body, painted in blood or red paint - probably the former. Can't say if that's just buckshot splatter of the perp was crazy - probably the latter.
Big tall red letters on the wall reading "FB PAID". Grudge? Debt collectors? Don't know. What I do know is that the darn scene was clean of alien prints. Plenty of "type I"s (Frederick's) or "type H"s (Kanye's), but not a single one of the killer's.
Or so I thought until I started to look over their phone. Their address book was humongous, 8 or 9 pages of contacts back to back. Regardless, I turned my eye and my scanner to the phone. There is this number you can call to get info on the last call to this number. 335-5491, at 19:15 Mon 01/02/79, as I'd learn later.
But more importantly there was a bip. A fingerprint found on top of the phone's receiver. Probably nothing, just another one of the tena- Type J?! Hell yes! That's a new one! Probably won't need it, given I had the exact time of death, but it's a good way to place the perp at the scene of the crime. Pretty much the holy grail of homicide investigation. Now they had no way to hide!
—
How did we get here? Why the heck was I planning on breaking into the Mint Tech offices on an off chance that the perp with the Type J fingerprints is someone connected to the partner of the victim? Wasn't this supposed to be an open and shut case?!
Yes. Yes it was. But as things usually are in life, stuff gets derailed by sheer idiocy of some barely human beings. Like politicians! Bureaucrats! Or, I don't know…
GREEDY LANDLORDS.
Odell Gilchrist is the most corrupt and awful human being in this damned place and I have a tenancy contract with the guy. Why am I saying such nice things about this piece of garbage? Why, it's all because of a single room on the 7th floor of the building he owns. It's supposed to be the administration. The place where all the camera data is funneled into the cruncher to be displayed to a studios guard or a concernedcop Enforcer.
Instead it's an empty room with some empty wooden shelves.
There goes that idea.
Sadly for me, I'm already too deep. Not only was I curious who that Type J person was, but I also swung by the Town's Hall just across the street, the place that's half Enforcer precinct and half hospital wards, and grabbed the paperwork for the case. As it turns out the town is willing to shell out up to 2k crowns to a private eye who points to the correct perp, with bonuses for arresting the perp, figuring out where they live, finding clues that place them at the scene of the crime, and locating the murder weapon. In other words they want me to do their job for them and they will bury me in more money than I got in a month of doing that same thing. I might not be greedy, but guy has bills to pay.
Regardless, the case ended up being a mess. First after the camera fiasco I went to Frederick's place of work. In the cafeteria of the chem plant I found a fingerprint from the employer from that photography job I put on hold. Neat and irrelevant.
Chem plant had pretty intimidating security, and their vents were blocked (someone really ought to fix that, dead air leads to bugs you know). However they also had the breaker for their fancy security system outside of the restricted area. A few liberal applications of lockpicks later and it's off, their office was not locked and files on employees were pretty much free for grabs.
Sad thing all of that was for nothing. Not a single match.
Fine. What about that phone call? 335-5491 at 19:15? Nope. Address book has the number under Keisna. Lives in 101st in those same Andrews Towers flats. Type K and Type L on the door. Just a concerned friend. Talked to the girl. Pleasant enough for someone terrified out of her mind. Nothing to see there.
A great idea after that would be to find a weapons dealer and inquire whomst recently bought a shotgun or buckshot ammo. The problem was that I didn't know where a weapons dealer was. It's not exactly legal to sell firearms, and criminals tend to avoid talking about such things in the presence of a cop.
And so here I was. Staring at the breaker for the Mint Tech's powergrid. I was pretty much out of leads. The perp had to be someone employed here. I was sure of it.
—
If there's one problem I never imagined having, it would be running out of lockpicks. Not only do I make sure to grab every hair pin and paperclip lying around (no, I don't have a problem with kleptomania, shut up), but also what can I say? I prefer to polish metal with my belly for hours instead of fiddling with locks for a minute in the broad lamp light. It has its bad sides, of course. Not only is there a chance the room you are trying to reach simply doesn't have a vent, but also that vent might be of a ceiling variety, and also be at the end of a maze of tubes going all the way to the 10th floor without connecting to anything in between. That and the darn auto-mapping feature of Gumshoe drops the vent data on each reload.
So I decided that it would be easier to just unlock the front door of Mint Tech and do it the straightforward way. Didn't help none - no matching prints there either. Another dead end. Guess it was time to do some actual leg work.
Asking around I was clued that the weapons dealer is located somewhere in the basements. After that it was a cakewalk to find. But getting in? That's another thing entirely. Girl behind the door was demanding a password. An actual good to god word you have to speak to her to get access, not those newfangled 4 digit codes that crunchers and safes now use. Did you know that the vast majority of people just write their passwords down on pieces of paper and leave them around for people like me to find? They have no one but themselves to blame when their expensive sync discs and upgrade syringes go missing and end up in someone who could put them to good use.
But I digress. The weapons dealer, right! I remembered something about the graffiti and the black market going hand to hand, so I excused myself and went to look. Found one, a stylistic bandit head with what seemed at the time like a random string of letters a cruncher programmer would come up with. Realized it was actually the word "blltzkrieg" when I tried to pronounce it.
The password was actually "dragon" and found on another piece of graffiti, one with an actual gun above the word. Gonna spare you the details of the conversation that went roughly like a constant repeat of "Password?" "blltzkrieg" "That's correct!" "Can I go in?" "No. Password?". Thought the darn teen was making fun of me. Maybe she was. She was, wasn't she?
No matter. I was inside. The girl graciously presented me with detailed records of all purchases done this year. Something to think about if I go shopping here. 6 names total, only 3 of them bought buckshot ammo. First letter of the name, full last name, date and time of purchase. Enough for me to bust each of them.
One of them has to be the Type J killer, right?
—
I sat in a comfortable chair of the captain of the Tau Enforcer Division in their secluded office on the 3rd floor of the town's hall. The cruncher was angrily beeping at me because of the paces I was putting it through. I had 3 buckshot buyers and a 9 page address book to go through. I felt like a failure. Dredging the gov database should be the last resort.
It kinda was.
Paying a visit to the 3 stooges with potential means of murder (none of whom were in any way connected to the victim and his partner) resulted in me finding more new fingerprints. None of whom matched the Type J.
That was it. My last lead. Or rather the last lead I was willing to leg it for. I still had the address book with all of the different flats and front doors I could scan.
Or I could drop by the precinct and have the beepers do the job for me.
Cruncher confirmed my findings. The 3 buckshot buyers definitely had no prints matching Type J. At least I hadn't made a mistake. Not here anyways. Address book was clean as well. Only had the first names and their addresses, but only one name yielded 2 hits. Small city is small.
And that was it. No more leads. The perp has gotten away with it.
Fuck.
—
I sat inside the kitchen cupboard of the 1004 Andrews Towers. A rounded man inside the flat couldn't seem to relax and sit down. My mind should've focused on making sure I didn't drop my chance to swing past him and grab the info I needed. Still didn't know whom I needed to picture - him or her.
And instead all I could hear was "That's why Sam left."
I looked at my watch. I think it was 10 or 11 AM. Sure didn't look like it by all the darkness streaming in through the windows. I still remember, vaguely, the brilliant warm radiance from my childhood.
Eh.
I swung the door open and boldly walked into the bedroom. Didn't bother with the stealth none. Guy didn't even notice me. Wardrobe is where people usually keep their important files. Not these fuckers - just an empty shoe box. The two drawers next to the beds were practically plastered with sticky notes with their 4 digit codes. Don't even remember if I grabbed anything out of the safe.
Guy finds me just as I grabbed his wife's business card. Don't remember the name, but the initials were AZ. Both super long and overly complicated with those special latin characters the other side of the globe loves to use. Her place of work? A restaurant sharing her last name. Girl be vain.
Husband reacted like an angry dog - grabbed a hammer and rushed me like a bull. We ran circles around the house as I tried to shake him and hide for a bit. Still thought I needed more info (I didn't). Finally managed to dodge into the entrance hall while he kept running through the living room. Must have been the wind.
The wind shivered with adrenaline, realizing that with that business card it had everything to disambiguate the couple. Wind traveled through the air duct and back to S- it's apartment. It had a restaurant to find.
—
I decided to swing by the Tau Division one more time just for thoroughness sake. Two searches in - bingo. Wife's the target. She wasn't home, so she was probably at work. The restaurant was literally on the ground floor of the Andrews Towers. Girl needed to just go down 10 flights of stairs and enter directly into the office - didn't even need to go around like a normal human being.
I know that because that's the way I exited. I exited that way because she was not there. The small cozy main hall of the restaurant passed me by as I got to the kitchen in the back. There was no one there, nothing was locked, and a single camera is not gonna stop me. Just behind the kitchen there was a small office room. A cruncher and some files and stuff. The door was opened. The cruncher was logged in. The safe was closed, but is keyed to the same personal code she had in her apartment. Not even a camera in there to annoy me.
Either way she was not there. Her file said her shift starts right about now, but she didn't seem to care. The only worker on duty said they saw her somewhere around Andrews Towers. I made a loop around without purpose, then sneaked back into the restaurant's office. I thought of checking the camera snapshots, see if I could see if she even was here at all.
Then I realized. If she's not here, she is probably home.
Another ride on the death trap to the 10th. No gunshots this time. On a hunch knocked on 1004th.
She opened..
Snatched the shot before she even realized what she was looking at. People usually get angry when you photo them without consent, but she was just too confused. Swung up to 1203rd and slid the polaroid under the door. Minutes later 900 crowns were added to my account.
Guess that day wasn't a total wash.
—
I decided to swing by the murder scene again and look for more clues. More Enforcers were now awake, but they are terrible at guarding a crime scene. Don't bother with the print scanner. Why would I? I already had the Type J. Found the victim 4 digits under a pack of tobacco. Best example of security I've found all day.
I sipped looking through the victim's partner's mail the first time around. Now with both their codes the cruncher would divulge me everything I wanted to know. Jk, no it wouldn't, you stupid pile of electronics. The mail box of both was as bare as a nightclub - full of noise and lacking any substance. There was one interesting mail from Fair Quotes. My first impression was that it's some kind of money lender. No. It's a stupid online service that will take your money and mail you random quotes. The mail to Frederick (the victim) was also weirdly threatening (don't remember the actual quote, but it could be read as "give us more money or else"), that also has an addition at the end that their balance is negative.
"FB PAID" in red letters on the wall - Frederic Bess paid for something with his life. Was it actually a debt collection gone wrong?
No financial statements in the files in the wardrobe, no way to tell. I found a bank in the basements while searching for the weapon's dealer. Maybe look there?
Nope, the local bank system crashed on New Years and they are still working on bringing it operational. They still work through the cruncher mail, but sadly no way to pull the manifests as of right now.
Okay, there was another long shot. Basement of the apartment complexes has this phone line box. Hidden in the power rooms and behind some impressive security, not to mention the trickiest locks I've ever picked. Locks I picked. I was 5 picks short of the needed 7.
Oh well. I was not broke anymore. Ran across the street to the town's hall and grabbed myself 3 sets of 30 picks. 150 crowns down the drain, but I probably wouldn't have to worry about them picks any time soon. Swung back down to Andrews basement, made sure the security system was off (breakers tend to untrip in 2 or so hours), slowly moved to the lo-
"There've been a murder at 503 Andrews Towers. Perpetrator unknown."
—
No "new case" this time. Either operators were idiots and didn't know how to do their job properly, or there were reasons to think the same Type J killed another victim.
Either way, I got into the phone records. Who's surprised that they were completely useless? The only call since new years to and from 604th was the one I heard 45 minutes after the murder occurred, the one from the 101st. They're clean, I was sure of that. Nothing else at all. Don't remember if I checked the 503rd at the time or not, but it didn't end up mattering.
What mattered was that I had the new crime scene to check out. And yes. Definitely the save perp. Same buckshot used, same circle around the victim, same "AJ PAID" in bloody (as in written in blood, not an Irish Kingdom expletive) tall letters. Victim was not poor though, their financial statement was clean. No borrowed money, half a 100k in the bank. Why they lived in a hellhole like the 5th floor of Andrews Towers is beyond me.
So here I was, going through the scene with the fingerprint scanner, running away from the Enforcers that heard me close a cupboard, returning back in to collect more clues… When suddenly I find a print not matching either of the tenants.
And it's not a Type J.
No, that print belonged to the Amrstrong Wright - one of the 3 buckshot buyers, coincidentally living in the 1003rd Andrews Towers flat - just a door down from my photo-target.
After that the case broke apart. Their house had no safe nor a cruncher, yet still had that damn 4 digit code note. No gun, no nothing to link them to the crime in their apartment. A weird crumpled paper ball with some weird rat prose? Hard to explain, and it was probably irrelevant. Probably. Also found a note with their work quota - morning til 17:00. It was 17:30 when I found it. Commute must be a bitch.
With nothing left to do there, I left 1003rd and started going down the stairs. People returning from work were also coming up, none risking the deathtrap. On a hunch I started paying close attention to these people, my Gumshoe grabbing their profiles as they came.
And then there he was. He didn't even realize what hit him. Passed him on floor 7, immediately turned around and trailed him from behind. On 8th finally got close enough to slap the cuffs on him. Didn't even get a chance to squeak. After calming down the concerned (read aggressive) bystanders by running a few floors down and waiting for them to give up, I returned back to the arrested Armstrong and searched him.
Dude was carrying the whole box of ammo and the shotty on him. Where he hid all that is beyond me.
And that was it. I filed out the paperwork, turned it in across the street. 2k crowns was nice. 200 social credit was new. Asking about, apparently there was now a social credit system. Didn't do anything at the moment, with one simple exception. There is this.. district they call it: Fields. The heaven on Earth for the rich and powerful. Anyone can apply. Once. And if your social credit is not up to par? You're stuck here with the rest of us. Sam could definitely get in there, with her research. For me? A pipe dream. Nothing more.
I swung by the Admiral to buy myself some good freaking food. Went back to… to my apartment, the 301st. And one thing still bugged me like an annoying fly.
Who was the Type J?
I had my work cut out for me.
————————————
Afterword:
That's pretty much where I am right now in my playthrough of the game. The lore tidbits might not exactly be accurate in my retelling, the Type J is probably an Enforcer carelessly leaving a print at the scene of the crime, the NPC's are flat and stupid and lack the capability to answer certain questions you'd really want to ask, the databases only search by name, not by other identifiers, vents sometimes get blocked by other generated terrain/items, it lags when I bring up my case board, combat and stealth are janky and frantic, some side jobs break if you try to reload a save while they are taken, and the darn ceiling vents really necessitate a double/higher jump augmentation.
I skipped over the aug "sync disk" system (it pretty much similar to Deus Ex (the original)'s aug canisters) and over the status effects (you get thirsty or hungry and you stop healing, you can eat and drink to get bonuses instead).
The game is rough, it's very early access, and right now fingerprints are the king. I couldn't pin down Armstrong simply because I didn't find his print. And despite all that?
I still recommend it. I got a story from it just by playing. A unique story. The one that started with "Hey, I heard the exact time of the murder, cameras will let me solve it easy." and ended with "Who is this mysterious and totally not an Enforcer Type J person?" It's an experience like no other. And dev promises to make it better.
So here's the link again: https://store.steampowered.com/app/986130/Shadows_of_Doubt/
And thank you for reading this.
It's now 12 Google Doc pages. It's also finished. Take a look at your own risk.
TL;DR: On 24th of April a game by the name of "Shadows of Doubt" entered early access. https://store.steampowered.com/app/986130/Shadows_of_Doubt/
It has many semi-game-breaking bugs, lag issues, and lacks some features. But what is already there is impressive as heck, and the dev actively patches all faults they can.
But I won't explain what the game is. I won't sing its praises. No, I will show you the core of the game the best way I know how: with a story.
—
Our story begins on a chilly 2nd of January of 1979. Appleton Springs - an overgrown oil rig that dares to call itself an arcology. A 3 by 3 city block jutting out of the rising ocean. Most food is replaced with synth analogs, sunlight is hard to come by, the weather changes from downpour to hale on a whim. Moreover, through legal loopholes and down right bribery, this country now welcomes our new glorious president: Starch Kola.
With a radical new regime comes radical new changes. Who needs competent police detectives when the president can simply expand its corporate security staff? That's how I found myself on these New Years: out of the job, deep in debt, and… Sam left…
Don't remember much of Jan 1st, nor the first half of the 2nd. When I came to, I was far from home, the rain soaking the front of my coat. I had to do something. Couldn't just sit still and wait. 100 crowns in my pocket, my trusty fingerprint scanner, and the Gumshoe aug - all I had going for me.
Guess it's time to try my hand at the whole "Private I" thing.
Don't remember where I got that first job. If I had to guess, it probably was the Admiral - a diner in the South-Western corner of this hellhole. A single-story eyesore compared to 10+ floored skyscrapers of the most of the city. But for one reason or another I always end up there when my feet ain't looking.
Besides the best god damned fried chicken and the only passable coffee, Admiral has this payphone cubby. Most food places have them. A great place to find the city's address book. But also a nice place to put up a note or 3. Usually it was something silly. "Selling vintage smoking pipe, used." "Basement apartment for sale. Bring your own pumps." "Feeling lonely? Call me."
But now? Now there wasn't a darn empty spot on that wall. 9 listings, most of them cries for help. For a given definition of "help". "Need a guy to trash an apartment." "Someone stole my expensive wine!" (and Enforsers don't do anything went unsaid) "We need a discrete individual for some… sensitive work."
One of them stood out to me: "Need a photo of a certain person. 900 crowns reward. Call [phone number]." For the love of me can't remember the digits. Always been my Achilles heel. Seemed like a simple job. Would have to buy a camera and there goes all my money, but the job seemed simple, quick, and painless.
And for the most part? It was. Cus it ain't the job that was the problem.
It was the gunshot I heard while doing it.
—
After jumping through the hoops the client thought would make them anonymous (they weren't, I had their fingerprint and the flat they requested the drop off to - more than enough for someone like me to shine some spotlight if I wanted to), I finally got the actual details. Specifically, the target's fingerprints and that they lived on the 10th floor of Andrews Towers. Small world. Sam's- My apartment is on the 3rd.
Not wanting to climb up all those stairs I opened the death cage mistakenly called an elevator and pressed the 10 button. Left along with my thought I focused on the noise the darn thing was making. And that's when
BANG!
A gunshot. Something high caliber, not those peashooter pistols. Wasn't really paying attention to which floor I was at, nor where exactly the shot came from. Broadly speaking 4th to 7th floors. I let my Gumshoe come to life, the relative time slowing down to a crawl. 18:31 on 01/02/79. I note it down, pin to my "Random" case board - pays well to have a place for random scraps of useless info to go to.
And then I completely ignored it.
Not my job, not my problem. I already bought the 85 crown camera - disposable, 10 or 15 shots, I think? Either way, handcuffs cost 50 to my 15, perp probably already hid in the crowd by now, and the damned lift doesn't stop mid movement. I was going to the 10th floor wherever I liked it or not. Plus it could also have been a simple accidental discharge, right? Right?
The cage opened and I carefully extricated myself from its deathly clutches. The usual Andrews Towers landing stared me in the face: a giant hole in the middle, flanked by 4 flats. There is never rhyme or reason for how the apartments are numbered on the floor, the landlord probably just slapped the last digits at random and called it a day. At least all of them are installed correctly - the idiot at Downs Grove has more than a few numbers installed backwards, mirrored and everything.
I pulled out the brick with the handle that is my fingerprint scanner. Were it not for how fragile the darn thing is, it would make a great blunt weapon. Sadly this is probably the last one I'll get, with the whole "not a policeman no more" thing. No James to yell at me for "breaking yet another one of the tax payer's expensive-ass thingimijigs!' Gotta make this one count.
This was a trick I learned in my rookie years. You would think that to get a print off of people you'd need to get into their homes or walk up to them and ask them "nicely". Both of those have chances of going not the way you'd want them to. But there is one thing no one can bar you from searching.
The front doors.
As it turns out most people need to touch their front door to go out of their apartment, all the while having little reason to touch other's. That means you can get a good idea of what prints live behind each door. But it gets even better. You see, people usually lock their doors. Doors that from inside the flats open outwards. That means that by knocking and having a person answer, that person is likely to leave fresh prints while unlocking on the inside of the front door. The side that they present to you by opening it.
Didn't have to resort to that trick, the prints of the target were easy to find. 1004th apartment, probably lived with someone else, given the density of the other party's prints. That complicated things. Were they alone, I'd just knock on the door, snag a shot and be gone in 20 seconds. As it stands I would have to learn more about them, probably break in, look for their workplaces and names, correlate their prints with identity somehow. Still would be a good idea to scan the other 2 doors, as the print might've been just from a neighborly visit (it wasn't, I checked).
But before I could even think of that, my Gumshoe fired up with a familiar radio ping.
"There've been a murder at 604 Andrews Towers. Perpetrator unknown. New case is open."
—
Let me explain the whole idiocy of the Enforcer program that our presidential overlord Starch Kola has plunged our law enforcement into in their great wisdom. Not only have they fired or demoted all of the experienced (and inexperienced) detectives. Not only have they hired the most idiotic goons to pose as Enforcers. Not only have they made it illegal to doubt that the Enforcers might do a great job (which is why you haven't heard this from me).
But they also completely failed to replace the old police systems with anything even remotely different.
Which means that I still get my old radio pings as the homicide detective.
Good old reliable Gumshoe immediately created a new case board for me to haphazardly fill with barely structured information. An old rush of curiosity joined up with a tinge of exasperation. I heard the shot. I know exactly when the murder happened. 18:31. With the cameras all over the place? Should be a cake walk.
It is at that moment that I realized that I'm going to find that killer just to spite them.
Still, no need to rush. The Enforcers will be all over the flat in just a few. Morons or not, I'm not a detective no more - no clearance for me to be there. But you know what they say. "It ain't a crime if you ain't caught." Just have to wait for them to finish, then swing by and explore the empty rooms. Might as well scan the rest of these 10th floor doors while I'm at it.
—
It is a lesser known fact, but the air vents that pierce the buildings like holes do cottage cheese are not actually that deadly. Take it from a duct rat like me: you can survive for whole minutes in there! And while yes, it does get a bit (a lot) chilly, it's actually a great way to get in and out of the places you ain't supposed to be in.
That was why I was perched on top of an open door in the victim's bedroom a couple of feet away from the crime scene at around 19:20 while somebody was walking around down there. No idea who that was either, probably an Enforcer, but I think I caught a glimpse of their outfit - didn't look like Enforcer garb to me!
Granted I was a bit distracted. First the victim's phone rang just as I was climbing under the floor. Potensial taunt from the killer? A worried partner wondering where the victim was? A wrong number? Either way it was a lead I could explore. Which probably didn't matter given I would just take the information from cameras.
Second and more pressing? The vent I entered through was of a ceiling variety. How's that relevant? Well, an average wall vent was positioned just high enough to be out of the way while also being reachable by, I don't know, a smug ex-detective with a talent for sleuthing without any extraneous help. You just walk up to one, open it up, pull yourself in. Not easy per say, but definitely doable.
But the ceiling ones? Those things are the spawn of the devil, and I don't even believe in the devil. They are always just out of reach no matter how hard you jump from the floor. You have to find something to climb onto. Those plastic stools that are usually around all over the place work well for that. But dropping somewhere where some people might decide to start shooting if they spot you? Kinda hard to look for one, much less position it properly. And so, after years of getting into trouble because of that, I learned one thing: ceiling vents are always a one way trip.
Which is funny in context because this one… wasn't. At least at the moment. It just so happened that the door to the bedroom when opened into the bedroom positioned itself perfectly under the vent. Hence why I was perched on top of it after entering the flat.
Lights were sadly on, so I dared not drop down. The switch was out of my reach on the other side of the doorframe. Thinking carefully I looked around the room, finally realizing where the light was coming from. I listened, meandering footsteps could be heard in the distance. I had no idea if they were watching the doorway, but there was no way to learn more. Time was running out, the prints getting stale with every passing second. I had to do something.
And so, with a twist of a lightbulb, the bedroom was plunged into darkness. And no one even noticed.
—
The victim ended up being one Frederick Bess. Worked at Yao's Chemical Systems (another low-story eyesore diametrically opposite the Admiral) as a security guard. Lived together with one Kanye Ukah, who in turn worked at Mint Tech - one of numerous do nothing offices in the city. I could've given you their blood type, date of birth, even shoe size - don't have the entry no more. Gumshoe runs out of memory fast.
Frederick was killed by a single buckshot discharge into their abdomen. Not sure if the shot was just that close range or what, but didn't find other pellet holes around. Speaking of around - there was a circle around the victim's body, painted in blood or red paint - probably the former. Can't say if that's just buckshot splatter of the perp was crazy - probably the latter.
Big tall red letters on the wall reading "FB PAID". Grudge? Debt collectors? Don't know. What I do know is that the darn scene was clean of alien prints. Plenty of "type I"s (Frederick's) or "type H"s (Kanye's), but not a single one of the killer's.
Or so I thought until I started to look over their phone. Their address book was humongous, 8 or 9 pages of contacts back to back. Regardless, I turned my eye and my scanner to the phone. There is this number you can call to get info on the last call to this number. 335-5491, at 19:15 Mon 01/02/79, as I'd learn later.
But more importantly there was a bip. A fingerprint found on top of the phone's receiver. Probably nothing, just another one of the tena- Type J?! Hell yes! That's a new one! Probably won't need it, given I had the exact time of death, but it's a good way to place the perp at the scene of the crime. Pretty much the holy grail of homicide investigation. Now they had no way to hide!
—
How did we get here? Why the heck was I planning on breaking into the Mint Tech offices on an off chance that the perp with the Type J fingerprints is someone connected to the partner of the victim? Wasn't this supposed to be an open and shut case?!
Yes. Yes it was. But as things usually are in life, stuff gets derailed by sheer idiocy of some barely human beings. Like politicians! Bureaucrats! Or, I don't know…
GREEDY LANDLORDS.
Odell Gilchrist is the most corrupt and awful human being in this damned place and I have a tenancy contract with the guy. Why am I saying such nice things about this piece of garbage? Why, it's all because of a single room on the 7th floor of the building he owns. It's supposed to be the administration. The place where all the camera data is funneled into the cruncher to be displayed to a studios guard or a concerned
Instead it's an empty room with some empty wooden shelves.
There goes that idea.
Sadly for me, I'm already too deep. Not only was I curious who that Type J person was, but I also swung by the Town's Hall just across the street, the place that's half Enforcer precinct and half hospital wards, and grabbed the paperwork for the case. As it turns out the town is willing to shell out up to 2k crowns to a private eye who points to the correct perp, with bonuses for arresting the perp, figuring out where they live, finding clues that place them at the scene of the crime, and locating the murder weapon. In other words they want me to do their job for them and they will bury me in more money than I got in a month of doing that same thing. I might not be greedy, but guy has bills to pay.
Regardless, the case ended up being a mess. First after the camera fiasco I went to Frederick's place of work. In the cafeteria of the chem plant I found a fingerprint from the employer from that photography job I put on hold. Neat and irrelevant.
Chem plant had pretty intimidating security, and their vents were blocked (someone really ought to fix that, dead air leads to bugs you know). However they also had the breaker for their fancy security system outside of the restricted area. A few liberal applications of lockpicks later and it's off, their office was not locked and files on employees were pretty much free for grabs.
Sad thing all of that was for nothing. Not a single match.
Fine. What about that phone call? 335-5491 at 19:15? Nope. Address book has the number under Keisna. Lives in 101st in those same Andrews Towers flats. Type K and Type L on the door. Just a concerned friend. Talked to the girl. Pleasant enough for someone terrified out of her mind. Nothing to see there.
A great idea after that would be to find a weapons dealer and inquire whomst recently bought a shotgun or buckshot ammo. The problem was that I didn't know where a weapons dealer was. It's not exactly legal to sell firearms, and criminals tend to avoid talking about such things in the presence of a cop.
And so here I was. Staring at the breaker for the Mint Tech's powergrid. I was pretty much out of leads. The perp had to be someone employed here. I was sure of it.
—
If there's one problem I never imagined having, it would be running out of lockpicks. Not only do I make sure to grab every hair pin and paperclip lying around (no, I don't have a problem with kleptomania, shut up), but also what can I say? I prefer to polish metal with my belly for hours instead of fiddling with locks for a minute in the broad lamp light. It has its bad sides, of course. Not only is there a chance the room you are trying to reach simply doesn't have a vent, but also that vent might be of a ceiling variety, and also be at the end of a maze of tubes going all the way to the 10th floor without connecting to anything in between. That and the darn auto-mapping feature of Gumshoe drops the vent data on each reload.
So I decided that it would be easier to just unlock the front door of Mint Tech and do it the straightforward way. Didn't help none - no matching prints there either. Another dead end. Guess it was time to do some actual leg work.
Asking around I was clued that the weapons dealer is located somewhere in the basements. After that it was a cakewalk to find. But getting in? That's another thing entirely. Girl behind the door was demanding a password. An actual good to god word you have to speak to her to get access, not those newfangled 4 digit codes that crunchers and safes now use. Did you know that the vast majority of people just write their passwords down on pieces of paper and leave them around for people like me to find? They have no one but themselves to blame when their expensive sync discs and upgrade syringes go missing and end up in someone who could put them to good use.
But I digress. The weapons dealer, right! I remembered something about the graffiti and the black market going hand to hand, so I excused myself and went to look. Found one, a stylistic bandit head with what seemed at the time like a random string of letters a cruncher programmer would come up with. Realized it was actually the word "blltzkrieg" when I tried to pronounce it.
The password was actually "dragon" and found on another piece of graffiti, one with an actual gun above the word. Gonna spare you the details of the conversation that went roughly like a constant repeat of "Password?" "blltzkrieg" "That's correct!" "Can I go in?" "No. Password?". Thought the darn teen was making fun of me. Maybe she was. She was, wasn't she?
No matter. I was inside. The girl graciously presented me with detailed records of all purchases done this year. Something to think about if I go shopping here. 6 names total, only 3 of them bought buckshot ammo. First letter of the name, full last name, date and time of purchase. Enough for me to bust each of them.
One of them has to be the Type J killer, right?
—
I sat in a comfortable chair of the captain of the Tau Enforcer Division in their secluded office on the 3rd floor of the town's hall. The cruncher was angrily beeping at me because of the paces I was putting it through. I had 3 buckshot buyers and a 9 page address book to go through. I felt like a failure. Dredging the gov database should be the last resort.
It kinda was.
Paying a visit to the 3 stooges with potential means of murder (none of whom were in any way connected to the victim and his partner) resulted in me finding more new fingerprints. None of whom matched the Type J.
That was it. My last lead. Or rather the last lead I was willing to leg it for. I still had the address book with all of the different flats and front doors I could scan.
Or I could drop by the precinct and have the beepers do the job for me.
Cruncher confirmed my findings. The 3 buckshot buyers definitely had no prints matching Type J. At least I hadn't made a mistake. Not here anyways. Address book was clean as well. Only had the first names and their addresses, but only one name yielded 2 hits. Small city is small.
And that was it. No more leads. The perp has gotten away with it.
Fuck.
—
I sat inside the kitchen cupboard of the 1004 Andrews Towers. A rounded man inside the flat couldn't seem to relax and sit down. My mind should've focused on making sure I didn't drop my chance to swing past him and grab the info I needed. Still didn't know whom I needed to picture - him or her.
And instead all I could hear was "That's why Sam left."
I looked at my watch. I think it was 10 or 11 AM. Sure didn't look like it by all the darkness streaming in through the windows. I still remember, vaguely, the brilliant warm radiance from my childhood.
Eh.
I swung the door open and boldly walked into the bedroom. Didn't bother with the stealth none. Guy didn't even notice me. Wardrobe is where people usually keep their important files. Not these fuckers - just an empty shoe box. The two drawers next to the beds were practically plastered with sticky notes with their 4 digit codes. Don't even remember if I grabbed anything out of the safe.
Guy finds me just as I grabbed his wife's business card. Don't remember the name, but the initials were AZ. Both super long and overly complicated with those special latin characters the other side of the globe loves to use. Her place of work? A restaurant sharing her last name. Girl be vain.
Husband reacted like an angry dog - grabbed a hammer and rushed me like a bull. We ran circles around the house as I tried to shake him and hide for a bit. Still thought I needed more info (I didn't). Finally managed to dodge into the entrance hall while he kept running through the living room. Must have been the wind.
The wind shivered with adrenaline, realizing that with that business card it had everything to disambiguate the couple. Wind traveled through the air duct and back to S- it's apartment. It had a restaurant to find.
—
I decided to swing by the Tau Division one more time just for thoroughness sake. Two searches in - bingo. Wife's the target. She wasn't home, so she was probably at work. The restaurant was literally on the ground floor of the Andrews Towers. Girl needed to just go down 10 flights of stairs and enter directly into the office - didn't even need to go around like a normal human being.
I know that because that's the way I exited. I exited that way because she was not there. The small cozy main hall of the restaurant passed me by as I got to the kitchen in the back. There was no one there, nothing was locked, and a single camera is not gonna stop me. Just behind the kitchen there was a small office room. A cruncher and some files and stuff. The door was opened. The cruncher was logged in. The safe was closed, but is keyed to the same personal code she had in her apartment. Not even a camera in there to annoy me.
Either way she was not there. Her file said her shift starts right about now, but she didn't seem to care. The only worker on duty said they saw her somewhere around Andrews Towers. I made a loop around without purpose, then sneaked back into the restaurant's office. I thought of checking the camera snapshots, see if I could see if she even was here at all.
Then I realized. If she's not here, she is probably home.
Another ride on the death trap to the 10th. No gunshots this time. On a hunch knocked on 1004th.
She opened..
Snatched the shot before she even realized what she was looking at. People usually get angry when you photo them without consent, but she was just too confused. Swung up to 1203rd and slid the polaroid under the door. Minutes later 900 crowns were added to my account.
Guess that day wasn't a total wash.
—
I decided to swing by the murder scene again and look for more clues. More Enforcers were now awake, but they are terrible at guarding a crime scene. Don't bother with the print scanner. Why would I? I already had the Type J. Found the victim 4 digits under a pack of tobacco. Best example of security I've found all day.
I sipped looking through the victim's partner's mail the first time around. Now with both their codes the cruncher would divulge me everything I wanted to know. Jk, no it wouldn't, you stupid pile of electronics. The mail box of both was as bare as a nightclub - full of noise and lacking any substance. There was one interesting mail from Fair Quotes. My first impression was that it's some kind of money lender. No. It's a stupid online service that will take your money and mail you random quotes. The mail to Frederick (the victim) was also weirdly threatening (don't remember the actual quote, but it could be read as "give us more money or else"), that also has an addition at the end that their balance is negative.
"FB PAID" in red letters on the wall - Frederic Bess paid for something with his life. Was it actually a debt collection gone wrong?
No financial statements in the files in the wardrobe, no way to tell. I found a bank in the basements while searching for the weapon's dealer. Maybe look there?
Nope, the local bank system crashed on New Years and they are still working on bringing it operational. They still work through the cruncher mail, but sadly no way to pull the manifests as of right now.
Okay, there was another long shot. Basement of the apartment complexes has this phone line box. Hidden in the power rooms and behind some impressive security, not to mention the trickiest locks I've ever picked. Locks I picked. I was 5 picks short of the needed 7.
Oh well. I was not broke anymore. Ran across the street to the town's hall and grabbed myself 3 sets of 30 picks. 150 crowns down the drain, but I probably wouldn't have to worry about them picks any time soon. Swung back down to Andrews basement, made sure the security system was off (breakers tend to untrip in 2 or so hours), slowly moved to the lo-
"There've been a murder at 503 Andrews Towers. Perpetrator unknown."
—
No "new case" this time. Either operators were idiots and didn't know how to do their job properly, or there were reasons to think the same Type J killed another victim.
Either way, I got into the phone records. Who's surprised that they were completely useless? The only call since new years to and from 604th was the one I heard 45 minutes after the murder occurred, the one from the 101st. They're clean, I was sure of that. Nothing else at all. Don't remember if I checked the 503rd at the time or not, but it didn't end up mattering.
What mattered was that I had the new crime scene to check out. And yes. Definitely the save perp. Same buckshot used, same circle around the victim, same "AJ PAID" in bloody (as in written in blood, not an Irish Kingdom expletive) tall letters. Victim was not poor though, their financial statement was clean. No borrowed money, half a 100k in the bank. Why they lived in a hellhole like the 5th floor of Andrews Towers is beyond me.
So here I was, going through the scene with the fingerprint scanner, running away from the Enforcers that heard me close a cupboard, returning back in to collect more clues… When suddenly I find a print not matching either of the tenants.
And it's not a Type J.
No, that print belonged to the Amrstrong Wright - one of the 3 buckshot buyers, coincidentally living in the 1003rd Andrews Towers flat - just a door down from my photo-target.
After that the case broke apart. Their house had no safe nor a cruncher, yet still had that damn 4 digit code note. No gun, no nothing to link them to the crime in their apartment. A weird crumpled paper ball with some weird rat prose? Hard to explain, and it was probably irrelevant. Probably. Also found a note with their work quota - morning til 17:00. It was 17:30 when I found it. Commute must be a bitch.
With nothing left to do there, I left 1003rd and started going down the stairs. People returning from work were also coming up, none risking the deathtrap. On a hunch I started paying close attention to these people, my Gumshoe grabbing their profiles as they came.
And then there he was. He didn't even realize what hit him. Passed him on floor 7, immediately turned around and trailed him from behind. On 8th finally got close enough to slap the cuffs on him. Didn't even get a chance to squeak. After calming down the concerned (read aggressive) bystanders by running a few floors down and waiting for them to give up, I returned back to the arrested Armstrong and searched him.
Dude was carrying the whole box of ammo and the shotty on him. Where he hid all that is beyond me.
And that was it. I filed out the paperwork, turned it in across the street. 2k crowns was nice. 200 social credit was new. Asking about, apparently there was now a social credit system. Didn't do anything at the moment, with one simple exception. There is this.. district they call it: Fields. The heaven on Earth for the rich and powerful. Anyone can apply. Once. And if your social credit is not up to par? You're stuck here with the rest of us. Sam could definitely get in there, with her research. For me? A pipe dream. Nothing more.
I swung by the Admiral to buy myself some good freaking food. Went back to… to my apartment, the 301st. And one thing still bugged me like an annoying fly.
Who was the Type J?
I had my work cut out for me.
————————————
Afterword:
That's pretty much where I am right now in my playthrough of the game. The lore tidbits might not exactly be accurate in my retelling, the Type J is probably an Enforcer carelessly leaving a print at the scene of the crime, the NPC's are flat and stupid and lack the capability to answer certain questions you'd really want to ask, the databases only search by name, not by other identifiers, vents sometimes get blocked by other generated terrain/items, it lags when I bring up my case board, combat and stealth are janky and frantic, some side jobs break if you try to reload a save while they are taken, and the darn ceiling vents really necessitate a double/higher jump augmentation.
I skipped over the aug "sync disk" system (it pretty much similar to Deus Ex (the original)'s aug canisters) and over the status effects (you get thirsty or hungry and you stop healing, you can eat and drink to get bonuses instead).
The game is rough, it's very early access, and right now fingerprints are the king. I couldn't pin down Armstrong simply because I didn't find his print. And despite all that?
I still recommend it. I got a story from it just by playing. A unique story. The one that started with "Hey, I heard the exact time of the murder, cameras will let me solve it easy." and ended with "Who is this mysterious and totally not an Enforcer Type J person?" It's an experience like no other. And dev promises to make it better.
So here's the link again: https://store.steampowered.com/app/986130/Shadows_of_Doubt/
And thank you for reading this.
