Shadows of Doubt

What's it called when you smoosh cyberpunk and noir together? Noirpunk? Whatever it's called, Shadows of Doubt pulls it off perfectly in this first-person open-world mystery game from developer ColePowered Games. Actually, the developer says "sci-fi noir", and I can see why they'd want to keep this game divorced from the term cyberpunk.

- Andrew Duncan

You play a detective who is pulled into solving a murder case in a randomly-generated city where the killer could be anywhere and anyone. Quite literally, you might live next to them for all you know, it all depends on where the evidence takes you.

I played a time-limited version of this game and, despite a 90-minute limit, somehow spent four hours playing it. The astute among you may realise that I probably played it more than once, but I actually only played it twice. Truth is, I got stuck in my second playthrough literally stuck behind an office cubicle and had to reload a save file from much earlier.

When given the option between a pre-built city and a randomly generated one, I did a run in both. The game started the same way both times - you wake up and get a note shoved under your door telling you to find a person who it turns out is dead. However, the environments were completely different, with one apartment being one floor up and the other requiring an elevator ride to save time. Also, all four apartments (mine and the victims') were completely different, and honestly an item required to proceed glitched through a kitchen cabinet slowing down the start of my second playthrough.