True Detective: Night Country episode 5 solves one mystery and opens up a few more
Everyone is right where they need to be for Night Country’s finale
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Everyone is right where they need to be for Night Country’s finale
A detective simulation is one of the best-suited setups for an immersive sim game, and after a few hours with Shadows of Doubt, out now in Steam Early Access, its execution of the genre’s key mechanics is something you need to see for yourself, especially if you enjoy games like Deus Ex, Thief, and virtually anything from Arkane.
At first glance, the voxel-style detective game might look like the sort of indie you find by the dozens when browsing Steam, but its remarkable freedom of choice and impressive city simulation help it stand out on a crowded digital storefront. It’s obvious the team at ColePowered Games understands the genre, and though the game is still being shaped in its early access period, it’s already become one of my favorite games of 2023.
Shadows of Doubt casts players in the role of a private eye living out of a small apartment and chasing down leads across a rain-soaked neo-noir city. Even before players can get to the point where they wake up in the dark of their bedroom, it’s interesting to find that the city is actually a seemingly infinite number of procedurally generated cities. While a story mode exists to walk players through a particular string of cases through a particular cityscape, there is also a more unpredictable sandbox mode that creates new cities and cases on demand, much like loading a new seed in Minecraft. Detectives themselves are similarly made up on the spot through a combination of player choices on features like skin color and gender, as well as a name generator that can be handcrafted or randomly re-rolled endlessly.
The Case Of The Golden Idol was one of my favourite games of 2022, but one twist I didn’t see coming from the heir to Obra Dinn’s detective crown was more of it, or more of it so soon, for that matter. Happily, developers Color Gray Games have announced a new DLC pack is coming for The Golden Idol next week called The Spider Of Lanka. Set in 1741, a year before the first scenario of The Golden Idol proper, this trio of new cases looks set to shed extra light on the titular idol whose mysterious powers set the original game in motion. I’m afraid I can’t tell you much more than that, as most of the announcement details have been slapped with big black REDACTED marks. Have a watch of the reveal trailer below instead.
Freshly announced puzzle game Crime O’Clock will be putting you in the shoes of a time-travelling detective when it comes out on June 30th, its release date seemingly perfectly timed (sorry) to coincide with Capcom’s object-hopping time puzzle detective game, Ghost Trick. In all seriousness, though, Crime O’Clock looks to be its own distinctive beast (and not just because you seem to play as a rabbit). It has shades of Where’s Wally? (or Waldo, Wanda, Willy, Valli, and my favourite, Ali for international readers) as you’re given densely illustrated maps to navigate, and pick out key details in order to stitch together clues to solve cases. It could be very cool if all the right cogs click together.