Shadows of Doubt is a procedurally generated Immersive Sim developed by ColePowered Games. The game takes place in a Cyberpunk dystopia, with the player cast as a former police enforcer who takes up the role of a Private Detective in hopes of staying afloat, and potentially a chance to head to The Fields, a suburban retirement district that Starch Kola uses to encourage the people to keep working.

In the game, the player is tasked with performing various types of detective work, such as taking odd jobs posted around the payphones of the city and investigating the murders that crop up. After some time wandering the streets, the game will determine a citizen to become a Serial Killer, and have them kill a target, leaving a Calling Card which gives the player a lead. Depending on how the generation works, the player may need to investigate the victim's workplace, use an odd clue to try and figure out the killer's name, or use the victim's contacts to narrow down who may potentially know them enough to want them dead, among other methods. This being a simulation, it is very possible for a lead to turn up a dead end, or a clue to be too vague at first, becoming more clear in later crime scenes.

The goal is to gain social credit from solving cases, eventually gaining the right to retire to The Fields. Until then, it is possible to buy a living space in the city, or even remain homeless, resolving basic needs through public facilities, or using other people's homes, with or without their permission.

The game launched on Steam in early access on 24th April 2023, and has been receiving patches since then, with new content planned for each quarter of 2023. The first major update, Cheats and Liars, would be revealed with a release date of 25th September 2023, with the addition of infidelity cases and a hotel being added to cities. The full version of the game released September 26, 2024.

Shadows of Doubt contains examples of:

• Acceptable Breaks from Reality: Examining a victim for a few seconds will instantly identify what they were killed with (including caliber, for firearms) and the approximate time of death, with no need to perform an autopsy. Of course, investigation would've been much harder otherwise.
• Affair Letters: The infidelity cases added in the Cheats and Liars update have such letters, whether handwritten or digital, as a potential clue for finding out who the paramour is.
• Air-Vent Passageway: An option for you to get around buildings. Unlike most examples, there are some caveats to this. For one, there’s no convenient map to the vents, so it is very possible to get lost in the maze of the ducts unless you manage to track down the building blueprints. Also, crawling around the metal tunnels will eventually cause you to feel cold, slowly draining your health, making it possible to pass out in the vents, forcing you to pay a fine for trespassing (plus any other fines you accumulated beforehand) alongside your hospital bill. Finally, nearby people can hear you crawling in the vent, so it's not quite as stealthy as in other games.
• All Crimes Are Equal: Getting caught committing any illegal act will immediately result in the witness attacking you, no matter if they're a cop, civilian, or automated security system. The only difference between picking a lock and attacking someone with a sword is the value of the fine you'll get hit with.
• Alternate History: The game is set in an alternate 1979 where the world is a heavily polluted, corporation-dominated dystopia. While world history isn't relevant to the gameplay, loading screen text and books provide some world-building:
  • The Point of Divergence is 1610 when English inventor William Lee's stocking frame knitting machine sparked a glorious industrial revolution in France. This didn't occur in reality because King Henri IV was assassinated, causing Lee to lose the backing of the French royal court, fail to find a market for his machine, and die in poverty.
  • After divergence, Bonnie Prince Charlie overthrew the Hanover dynasty in England in 1745 with help from a much wealthier France, cementing peace between the kingdoms. Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette presided over the union of France and England into the Anglo-French Empire, which reigned over most of western Europe and North America through the end of the 19th century.
  • The "Old Bourbon Empire" finally collapsed in 1901 after a decade of civil conflicts that involved chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, and was reorganized into the United Atlantic States in 1902. The UAS decided to recognize corporate personhood to revitalize its struggling economy in 1909, and this opened the door for the corporation Starch Kola, producer of the world's most popular beverages and snack foods, to be elected president in 1965.
  • By 1973, sea levels had risen so high that cities were cut off from each other, rendering automobiles obsolete. The reduction of farmland caused a global famine between 1976 and 1979, which was solved by Starch Kola inventing synthetic meat and making the technology public.
• Always Night: While the Earth still undergoes a normal day/night cycle, the pollution is so bad there is very little difference between the two any longer, and the city is plunged in a pseudo eternal night.
• America Is Still a Colony: Thanks to France and England joining the Anglo-French Empire, the American Revolution was swiftly suppressed in 1776. In-game, a building's 1st floor is referred to as the Ground floor, in the European style.
• Anonymous Public Phone Call: Classic red telephone boxes can be found throughout the city, and cost one crow to use. Many businesses, especially restaurants and bars, also have public phones; these usually have job offers posted next to them. Killers and job givers may also use a public phone, making it impossible for you to track them down via their number.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • There can only be one Serial Killer in the city at a time, ensuring the player doesn't get mixed up trying to figure out which murder belongs to which case.
  • Likewise, it's Never Suicide, preventing players from wasting time chasing murderers that don't actually exist.
  • Most killers target people they know, so even if all your other leads turn up blank, you still have a chance of being able to brute-force the case using the victim's address book and coworkers' info.
  • NPCs are not programmed to have friends or hang out in each other's homes. If you see someone going into someone else's apartment and it's not their spouse, it's the murderer.
  • Likewise, a fingerprint found inside the victim's apartment which doesn't belong to the victim or their spouse will always be the murderer's. In the rare case in which the spouse is the murderer, there will be an absence of foreign fingerprints and other major clues you can follow up on. However, suspicious notes will be found around the apartment indicating the killer lives there, because it's the spouse.
  • Citizens reuse passcodes for all safes, door keypads, and computers in their possession. If you find a note with a code for a person's safe, you now also have access to the rest of their secure devices.
  • You can't ever lose your flashlight, watch, fingerprint scanner, codes, and keys, even if all your other items are taken away. Likewise, you can't lose your case notes; once you've seen a piece of information, you know it forever, though it may be a challenge to find it again to pin it to your case board afterward.
  • The detective doesn't leave fingerprints on things they touch outside of their own apartment, preventing you from wasting time investigating your own prints (or smudging fingerprints already present).
  • The player can't die, just pass out from their injuries. If the authorities take you down, you wake up in the city hall medical ward fully healed, but with the medical costs and fines for your crimes automatically deducted from your wallet. If you get mugged, you wake up in a random basement room.
  • Light switches glow in the dark, saving the player time and energy scanning every inch of the room with their flashlight just to brighten up the place.
  • As with the Grand Theft Auto games, should you break the law yourself (deliberately or not), the Enforcers will give up and forget everything if you can evade them... or you'll fail and, as above, end up in the hospital with only a hit to your wallet. Criminal records aren't a thing, and there's no way you can screw up so badly that the law takes you off the streets for good.
  • You can always hand in a completed side job and have it processed in a few seconds, even if the job giver is away or unconscious. When handing it over the phone, in particular, you're always answered instantly, and you can use the recipient's own phone to call them.
• Archaic Weapon for an Advanced Age: Since you can't shoot guns, swords are some of the better weapons you can use.
• Arms Dealer: A firearms dealer will be present somewhere in each city, operating illegally and requiring a password in order to buy from them. Any gun-using killer will buy from them, which leaves a record in the sales ledger.
• Artificial Meat: Artificial animal meat, invented by Starch Kola, is the norm everywhere and is sometimes blended with "reconstituted" real meat to make things like burgers and fried chicken.
• Awesome, but Impractical: With enough money, it's possible to buy a prestigious penthouse apartment in the Echelons. However, this is highly impractical in gameplay terms, since you'd have to go all the way up to the 15-18th floor and back down to the street whenever you need to use the facilities or deposit items there. A modest basement or 1st floor apartment is way more practical, even if they're quite a bit smaller and more barebones.
• Badass Bystander: Every once in a while, a random citizen you end up getting into a brawl with (usually because you've been raising a ruckus) will turn out to be a lot more durable than normal. It's unclear if these folks are off-duty Enforcers or just randomly absolute units.
• Back-Alley Doctor: Black market sync clinics can be present as illegal businesses. The main reason for the player to visit them is in order to buy sync discs that improve one's ability to sneak and engage in burglary.
• Back Stab: Striking a citizen in the back (or while they're sleeping) will do more damage. A sword, in particular, will usually do enough damage for a One-Hit Kill.
• Be as Unhelpful as Possible: Trying to ask information from citizens (even as basic as their name) often results in them refusing to provide any, sometimes even if you offer them money. Granted, your dialogue lines are pretty vague and don't tend to mention what you're investigating, and you're a private citizen rather than an Enforcer.
• Bio-Augmentation: "Sync discs" allow you to modify your own genes to provide various benefits.
• Black Market: A gun dealer and a black market (which serves as a pawn shop) hide somewhere in the Fathoms of every city. They exist in the gameplay mainly to supply would-be murderers with firearms since private gun ownership is illegal in the UAS. However, gun dealers also keep partial records of their customers, so if an active killer is using a gun of some kind, it's usually worth it to check the local gun dealer for recent gun purchases.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Inventory space expansion for sync discs. The other possible benefit from the disc simply isn't as good as being able to carry a few more items, especially since their other benefits aren't all that good, and can be partially substituted with items.
  • For combat, nothing beats having a sword and a ballistic armor. The former allows you to knock people out in two hits, while the latter will make you survive more hits before passing out/dying.
• Bounty Hunter: Although optional, you can actually arrest the killer to make more money. You can also take "arrest" side jobs, which require tracking down and arresting those wanted by the Enforcers.
• Bulletproof Vest: Ballistic armor is pricy and can only be looted from enforcer divisions, but it reduces the damage you take (especially from guns) in exchange for taking up an inventory slot
• Buy or Get Lost: Unless you have the appropriate social credit perk unlocked, any establishment that serves food or drinks will kick you out if you stay for too long without buying.
• Calling Card: Murder scenes will usually contain at least one of these, whether it be a message scrawled in red near the corpse, or an object left behind at the scene of each crime. More often than not, the object variety will have the killer's fingerprints on them.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Any random citizen you meet may eventually become important for a future case, and the game keeps any record you make of a citizen in preparation for this. If such a person does end up having a significant role, your previously collected info will provide a head start for the case.
• City Noir: The city is quite grim, with people working dead-end jobs in the vague hope of obtaining retirement, large buildings with many apartments and companies, and of course, a lot of crime.
• Civil War: The Anglo-French Empire collapsed at the end of the 19th century due to a series of rebellions collectively known as the Mustard War. The name refers to the use of mustard gas by the military, as well as the four yellow fleur-de-lis on the Anglo-French flag.
• The Cobbler's Children Have No Shoes: In the course of your investigations, you often take advantage of the way that most passwords follow simple rules and that people reuse passwords. Meanwhile, your personal password is always 1234, and you reuse it like everybody else does, although you at least don't leave out notes in your starting apartment.
• Common Law Marriage: Implied, as marriage-related terms are never used, with cohabiting couples always being referred to as partners.
• Conspicuously Public Assassination: It's possible for the victim of a killer to be murdered in the public space of a building or even out in the streets. It actually works pretty well, too, because citizens are pretty apathetic to NPCs fighting and won't arrest the murderer in any case, the cameras take snapshots in random time intervals, and it's impossible to get a useful fingerprint (unless the killer left something behind) or footprint.
• Criminal Mind Games: Occasionally, the killer will leave a note taunting the detective by asking them to play a game, followed by a string of random letters. This usually backfires on them, mostly because said letters are actually an anagram for their full name, making it much easier to narrow down the murderer once you figure it out.
• Cue the Billiard Shot: Pool tables are common furniture in bars; you can even play a little by interacting with the balls.
• Cyberpunk with a Chance of Rain: You won't be seeing much of the sun, just overcasting clouds, which often give way to rain (or, a bit more unusually for the genre, snow).
• Damage-Increasing Debuff: Getting hit in combat can inflict the Bruised debuff, increasing the damage you take from further attacks.
• Damage Over Time: Being attacked (even with fists) can cause you to bleed, causing you to slowly lose health. You can either counteract it by boosting your regeneration and waiting for a few hours, or you can just use a bandage to quickly stop it.
• Deadly Gas: Mustard gas was employed extensively by the Anglo-French Empire against rebels during the Mustard War.
• Defiant to the End: The Cheats and Liars update added the ability to announce to someone that you’re arresting them. There’s a good chance that they’ll refuse this, and proceed to attack you, usually with the same weapon they used on their victims, forcing you to beat them into submission before you can cuff them.
• Destructive Saviour: An arrest/murder case will often encourage you to act like this, since you don't have any law enforcement privileges, and unethical means of investigation can reward you with valuable clues. Thus, a successful attempt to catch a murderer can end with many burglarized apartments and workplaces, dozens of citizens beaten unconscious and robbed, and several broken windows.
• Different States of America: The United Atlantic States, which spans North America and western Europe.
• Dirty Cop: Implied by the fact that you can find arrest side jobs (always posted by Enforcers) in gambling dens. Meaning that the Enforcers know where an illegal business is, but aren't all that eager to shut it down since they can use the patrons in some way.
• Disk One Nuke: Katanas turn hand-to-hand combat against any non-Enforcer into a joke, and one can be looted any time.
• Does Not Like Guns: The combat section of the help menu mentions that “You swore off the use of firearms long ago”, explaining why Pistol-Whipping is all you can do with guns.
• Donut Mess with a Cop: Donuts are one of the cheaper food items available in the game, are decently filling, and can even be purchased from vending machines, making them rather convenient for the semi-sanctioned private detective on the go.
• Double-Edged Buff: Consuming painkillers or being hospitalized will cause you to become Numb, which makes you more resistant to damage, but also makes you do less damage.
• Dramatic Slip: Being wet will cause you to slip randomly while moving. It's merely annoying under normal circumstances, but it can easily kill you if it happens during a fight or a chase.
• Dynamic Entry: It's entirely possible to knock on someone's door, wait for them to unlock it, and immediately kick it open straight into their face, knocking them out instantly.
• Elite Mooks:
  • Any citizen with a longarm is extremely dangerous, often able to kill/KO you in 2-3 shots.
  • Enforcers are extremely heavily armored and can power through multiple strikes from a sword or katana, which are a One-Hit Kill against anyone else.
• Emergency Weapon: You can fight with your fists, but they're extremely weak without upgrades, taking 10+ punches to down a single citizen. Citizens fighting unarmed, meanwhile, are vulnerable to having their blows countered or blocked by your own fists.
• Everyone Is Armed: The majority of citizens will carry some kind of a weapon, which can possibly result in everybody pulling out a gun when they witness you committing a crime. Gun ownership is also extremely common, as you'll often find pistols while looting apartments.
• Evidence Dungeon: A killer's apartment may turn out to be full of papers alluding their killings. It only takes a few seconds to instantly realize that it's the current killer's apartment.
• Evidence Scavenger Hunt: Your bread and butter, as investigations primarily depend on physical clues, and talking to people doesn't reveal that much evidence. In a murder case, for instance, you'll want to check around for suspicious fingerprints and footprints, check the victim's mail and address book, look at the surveillance footage, find the murder weapon (if left at the scene) and the Calling Card, ask as to who last called the apartment, and then go to the victim's workplace and contacts.
• Fair-Play Whodunnit: Mostly followed, since the game relies on the player's deductive skills. Because of the Immersive Sim nature of the game, however, it's possible to be helped by a coincidence (such as if a person you robbed turns out to have the fingerprints you saw on the scene), and the perpetrator is usually a stranger.
• Fantastic Drug: Invoked by Starch Kola with a Sync Disc that grants a sizeable cash loan in exchange for you becoming extremely addicted to their signature soft drink, leading to withdrawal symptoms should you not consume any for a short time. To remove the Sync Disc, you have to pay off your debt, which can be accomplished by recommending Starch Kola to other citizens.
• Fictional Currency: The currency of the UAS is the credit. Credits are nicknamed "crows" due to the coins having a bird on one face.
• Film Noir: The game's aesthetics take after this genre, particularly the constant rain and snow.
• Final Death Mode: The Permadeath modifier makes it so you can no longer be revived at hospitals upon death, though you can still reload a previous save. The trope is played straight if you also activated Ironman mode (which only allows for a single save slot per character), in which case your save file is deleted upon death.
• Fingerprinting Air: As one of the Acceptable Breaks from Reality, your scanner can easily find a fingerprint in a few seconds of scanning, and nobody ever wears gloves. It won't be on everything the person touches, but you're near-guaranteed to find the killer's fingerprint if you carefully check around the murder scene. Employee files and government databases will also always store fingerprints.
• First-Person Ghost: All you ever see of your character is their hands (and sleeves). Your profile doesn't have a photo associated with it, you don't show up in reflections—hell, you don't even leave fingerprints.
• Fleur-de-lis: The flag of the Anglo-French Empire bears four fleurs-de-lis surrounding Saint George's Cross.
• Flooded Future World: With industrialization occurring earlier and being much more extensive in the game's timeline, Global Warming was recognized as a looming calamity as early as 1910. By 1979, so much of the world was underwater that it caused a major food shortage, and cars fell out of use and now rust in the streets because roadways between cities are submerged. Even the cities aren't completely dry; the sub-basement levels of every building are persistently flooded.
• Forensic Accounting: Killers will usually buy their tools shortly before they kill somebody. Therefore, it's useful to check out the sales records of the relevant shops - gun dealers for firearms; pawn shops, hardware stores, and black markets for melee weapons; pharmacies for poison.
• Foreshadowing: Can happen quite often, especially if one is particularly attentive to random dialogue or NPC behaviors. A particularly unique example considering the game's divergent gameplay means none of them are planned beforehand by the game's development team.
  • Pay attention if a random civilian you bother suddenly whips out a gun when they become hostile, especially if the current line of murders all have gunshots as the unifying cause of death. There's a significant chance they may in fact be the killer you're currently hunting and are threatening you with the murder weapon, especially if it's a shotgun or a rifle.
  • Occasionally you might notice characters talking about the Red Gums Cult, and sometimes one of the sides of that conversation will tell the other not to talk about them. If you're currently looking into a murder with clear signs of occult involvement, that character is worth looking into to see if they're the one committing murders in the cult's name.
  • It's entirely possible to run into the killer on their way out of the crime scene. If you're familiar with the population of a particular apartment building and notice someone out of place right after a murder is reported, they're worth looking into.
• Future Slang: Computers in this setting are called "crunchers".
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: Citizens you arrest in Enforcer missions can later be found back in the city and working at their job, no worse for wear.
• Graceful Loser: After the Cheats and Liars update, you can announce to someone that you’re arresting them, with a chance that they will accept that they’ve been caught, and allow you to cuff them.
• Gratuitous Katana: Despite the game taking place in an Alternate History that is rather Anglocentric, it is still not uncommon to find a katana around the city, even being sold at pawn shops.
• Greasy Spoon: Somewhat dingy 24-hour diners can be found throughout the city. Since your jobs don't follow any particular timetable, you'll often find yourself eating at these simply because they're the only places that stay open late and keep you out of the rain (or snow).
• Geo Effects: Rain causes you to become wet, increasing the chances of slipping if you run on certain surfaces but also cleaning you slowly. Snow (or crawling around in air ducts) causes you to become cold over time, draining your health.
• Great Detective: You, if you put the legwork in.
• Great Offscreen War: The Mustard War, which ended well before the present but certainly informs the world that the protagonist lives in.
• Gun Acquisition Explanation: Any killer who uses a gun will buy from a dealer shortly before their first murder. Since dealers will record all their transactions, you can use the sales ledger in order to track down the killer.
• Hammerspace: Items carried by citizens are never visible until you search them, making it possible for a short man in a shirt to pull out a sniper rifle out of nowhere when you punch him.
• Hand Cannon: The Lucky 7 is noticeably more powerful than the Lazarus 5, with 4-5 shots usually being enough to down you on the Normal difficulty. Against NPCs, meanwhile, 2 shots are usually enough.
• Harassing Phone Call:
  • Calling a phone number and immediately hanging can be used to track down people, as doing so will add your call to the phone records of the buildings that the call was made and received from.
  • The victim of a killer may have received harassing calls from a killer. This can help you track them down by calling the "Identify last caller" number, although it's not a guarantee (as the victim may have received a legitimate call from somebody else).
• Hardboiled Detective: The overall atmosphere of the game seems to encourage this, though it's up to you if you play the archetype straight or subvert it.
• Harder Than Hard: The Extreme difficulty. Any kind of combat is ill-advised on it - without appropriate sync discs and armor, it's possible to be killed in one hit by being struck with a hammer, and a gunman can easily kill you out of nowhere. Thus, it becomes necessary to sneak, fight dirty, and use status effects to raise your maximum health.
• Heal Thyself: Effects inflicted in combat (Broken Leg, Bruised, Bleeding) can slowly disappear on their own, but you're generally better off using splints, painkillers, and bandages, respectively. Painkillers will also help you recover from health loss if you can't or don't want to wait for your health to regenerate, such as if you have an angry mob chasing after you.
• Hello, [Insert Name Here]: At the start, you choose the name for your protagonist (along with their gender and skin colour), as well as a name for the city that gets generated.
• Hero Insurance: So long as you don't get knocked out while you have a fine, everything goes in the course of an investigation. You can rob homes, steal information, assault citizens, and falsely imprison suspects, but none of that will affect your payout if you complete the case.
• Hidden in Plain Sight: One of the Status Effects in the game is this. Usually you can pull it off by covering your face with a newspaper.
• Hide Your Children: Considering the deeply noir-inspired setting and the gruesome murders happening on a regular basis, the game's decision to remove kids is probably a smart choice in that it lowers the amount of NPC 'clutter' in the world and prevents the emergent AI from generating either a child killer or a killer child.
• A Homeowner Is You: You can purchase multiple apartments across each city. There's also an option when generating a new city to begin the game with a pre-furnished, mid-size apartment.
• Horrible Housing: Basement apartments suffer from being small (only having a bedroom and a bathroom), lack of a phone, no wallpapers (so you only have bare concrete/brick), and the outside being filthy and full of graffiti. They're also positioned only one floor above the flooded section of the basement, so they're probably also perpetually damp. There's a reason as to why they're extremely cheap.
• Hyperactive Metabolism: Being hydrated and/or well-fed will increase your health regeneration, so if you got badly hurt, going to the nearest food vendor can be a useful way to heal faster.
• If It Bleeds, It Leads: In-universe newspapers usually feature details about whatever murder has recently taken place—including stuff the player may have missed, making it worthwhile to go to a newsstand to snag a copy after leaving the crime scene.
• Illegal Gambling Den: A city will always have at least one. You can't gamble yourself, but it serves as a bar and has a phone and a job board.
• Immersive Sim: The city is fully simulated, and every citizen has their own routine that they will follow, there is no set story beyond the basics, and new cases will be generated over time. Many methods of investigation require some knowledge of how the systems tie together.
• Implacable Man: The concept behind the "Immortal Snail" modifier added in the Modifiers update. Your detective is completely invincible against all damage, but an unkillable snail will slowly follow them throughout the campaign. If the snail touches you, you die instantly.
• Improvised Weapon: Any weapon you can wield in-game that isn't a truncheon, sword, combat knife, or one of the various guns is this. Options range from chef's knives to hammers to syringes. You can also pick up and throw random decorative objects, which is surprisingly effective.
• Infinite Flashlight: You've got one. It's apparently built into your head since it doesn't actually appear in your inventory and you can activate it while holding something else in your hands. You will need it, since some areas of the game (like cupboards) are very dark, and it can be disadvantageous to switch on a light when you're trying to sneak around.
• Infinity +1 Sword: The sword and the katana are pricy (costing hundreds of crows to buy) and rare, but allow knocking out people in 1-2 hits, making combat much easier than before. By the time you scrounge up enough cash to buy sync discs and decent apartments, one of them is going to be your mainstay.
• Interface Screw:
  • Suffering from Cold will make you screen occasionally shake as if shivering.
  • Being Nauseous and/or Drunk will make your view sway.
  • Health loss will make the screen lose color, until it eventually goes monochrome when you're close to dying.
• An Interior Designer Is You: Your apartment can be decorated to your heart's content.
• Inventory Management Puzzle: You start with 4 inventory slots, which is really tight and not enough to hold all your gear, especially since you'll want to keep a slot free for food and drinks. You can expand to 11 slots, which fits in all the equipment you may need, although you'll want to go light while robbing apartments.
• Katana Superiority: Katanas and swords are just about the best melee weapons in the game, able to One-Hit Kill the vast majority of the city's populace. In the default scenario, you can loot one from the first victim's apartment.
• Key Under the Doormat: A possible feature for apartment complexes to generate is doormats, and there’s a small chance any given doormat will have a key hidden underneath, which you can claim if you shift the doormat away. This is much more likely for apartments on the lower floors of the building; the wealthy elites who occupy the top floors seem to be more security-savvy.
• Kinky Cuffs: You can sometimes find handcuffs in bedroom drawers or under the bed itself. This usually only occurs if the occupant of the unit has a partner.
• Kleptomaniac Hero: While sneaking into a citizen's home or workplace, you can steal any loose items lying around, including keys and money which never take up inventory space. It's possible to accumulate a key to nearly every door in the city. Not to mention that stealing information is the main reason you'll be sneaking into places in the first place.
• Laser Hallway: Some businesses, and most higher-end apartments, have security lasers installed that periodically sweep over the room. The beam is visible to the naked eye, so it's not too hard to get out of the way, but unlike CCTV cameras it trips the alarm instantly if it detects you.
• Law Enforcement, Inc.: The Enforcers are a privatized police force owned by the Starch Kola company. As to be expected, they don't do much beyond sealing up crime scenes and leaving the actual investigating to private detectives.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: When telling a killer that you're arresting them for murder, they may respond with "You think I'm the only killer in town?". They are, in fact, the only killer in town right now, since it's impossible for there to be multiple killers operating at the same time.
• Little Useless Gun: The Lazarus 5 pistol is the weakest gun an NPC can use. On the Normal difficulty, you can easily survive half-dozen shots and still stay conscious and able to retaliate. It even struggles against other NPCs, too, taking at least 3 shots to kill.
• Loan Shark: At least one loan shark will be present in the city as an illegal business. Unlike most examples of the trope, however, their conditions are very fair — you get 2000 crows and pay 250 each day, until you pay 2250 crows total. Granted, they will send a debt collector if you fail to pay, but you only have yourself to blame.
• Mad Scientist: When examining the den or home of a kidnapper, there may be letters from someone who works as a scientist, the scientist being the one ordering the kidnapping. The den itself will be filled with chemicals and scientific equipment, with the implication the victim is being used as an unwilling test subject.
• Made of Iron:
  • On the Easy and Normal difficulties, you start out pretty tough, being able to easily take 7 pistol/turret shots without being downed (albeit badly injured). With the Tenacity and Physique discs, you can easily take 1.5x as much, especially when combined with armor and buffs.
  • It's impossible for the detective to kill a citizen, no matter what you do to them. Even if you knock them out and throw their body off the roof of a 19 story tall building, or throw them into the ocean, they'll make an Unexplained Recovery and be back to their normal schedule later.
• The Main Characters Do Everything: You're the only Private Detective in the city, and the enforcers don't have detectives of their own. Of course, considering that the maximum population of a city is less than 2k, being the only private detective around is actually pretty justified.
• MegaCorp: The backstory of the game explains that Starch Kola is a megacorporation that was elected president of the United Atlantic States, and has held the office for 14 straight years. Other megacorps include Kaizen-6, which is president of the Eastern Dynasties, investment bank Kensington Indigo, global news service Candor, and Elliot Genetics.
• Missing Steps Plan: Some kidnappings are motivated purely by greed, with the kidnapper hoping to profit by the spouse paying the ransom money. By random generation, it's completely possible for a kidnapper to kidnap their own spouse, expecting to hit the jackpot when they receive the ransom from... themselves. What makes this even more hilarious is that spouses never pay the ransom, not wanting to give money to criminals, so if a kidnapper kidnaps their own spouse they expect to collect a ransom of their own money from themselves despite knowing they're not going to pay the ransom. This can circle back around to Crazy Enough to Work, as the detective can end up paying the ransom themselves just to resolve the case, but it's clear from the kidnapper's notes this was never part of their plans.
• Money for Nothing: Although money starts out tight, it'll quickly become a non-issue, as rich apartments (and offices) have a lot of valuable diamonds, you can't buy sync upgrade vials, and many sync discs are not for sale. Thus, you can only use money to buy apartments, but you're generally better off buying a reasonably priced apartment at the lower floors of the building.
• My Rules Are Not Your Rules: Actually works out in your favor. You have infinite stamina and can sprint indefinitely; meanwhile NPCs can keep pace with you in a chase, but tire out eventually and need to catch their breath.
• Never One Murder: Forced by the game's mechanics. Every killer will eventually kill again if the case isn't solved, though new murders usually take a few hours to happen and they never claim more than one victim at a time. Even if they somehow go through their original pool of victims, such as their co-workers or acquaintances, they'll just find a new pattern to continue killing in.
• Newspaper-Thin Disguise: You can carry a newspaper and hold it up in front of your own face to hide from citizens.
• No Smoking: Even though you can find cigarettes lying around, you can't smoke them, and neither can NPCs.
• NPC Amnesia: Citizens don't hold grudges, so even if you run amok in a building or otherwise get people mad at you, all you have to do is leave and wait for the alarm to expire, at which point everything's back to business as usual.
• Nuclear Option: Late in the Mustard War, when mustard gas proved insufficient to put down rebel groups, the Anglo-French Empire resorted to nuclear weapons.
• Omniscient Database: Downplayed. Various businesses keep databases of employees or customers, which can be a wealth of information in their own right, but the only database that includes everyone is the government database accessible from City Hall. To search for someone in a database, you must know their name; you can't search for their description or other details.
• One Case at a Time: Only a single murderer can be active at a time, and you can usually close their case in a few days or even a few hours if you get lucky. Side jobs can allow you to avert this, however, as you can take multiple jobs at a single time, and you can combine them with the current murder case.
• One-Hit Kill: If a thrown object is capable of doing damage, it will always KO whoever it hits.
• One-Man Army: One of the achievements requires to knock out every single citizen at least once. Even with the smallest city possible, this still means fighting over a hundred people.
• "Open!" Says Me: If you're desperate to open a door, you can try to ram it. It makes a lot of noise and takes multiple attempts (unless you have a sync disc for it), but it doesn't cost anything and will KO whoever is standing behind it.
• The Password Is Always "Swordfish": Some people will set their dates of birth or the dates of birth of their spouse as the passwords, making it possible to crack safes and crunchers by brute force. Most people (or their partners and coworkers) will also leave notes that state what password they use, even in publicly accessible spaces. Also, everybody reuses their passwords, so if you cracked their safe, then you can also easily hack into their cruncher account. Your own password is also always 1234, although your starting apartment at least doesn't have notes lying around with the password.
• Password Slot Machine: The consumable password-cracker appears to work like this - you can clip it to anything with a password and it will brute-force it one digit at a time, locking in each correct digit from left to right
• Phone-Trace Race: There is no race, but if you want to track down somebody via their phone number, you first have to call them on a phone, then break into the power room of the building you called from. From there, the call records will tell you which building received your call. Then you have to break into that building's power room, which will finally tell you as to which exact apartment received your call.
• Pistol-Whipping: The detective Does Not Like Guns, and as such, hitting people is all you can do with them; you can't actually fire them.
• Police Brutality: Just like everybody else, the enforcers will respond to any crime by gunning down the offender, only fining them if they pass out and survive the attack. To make matters worse, they will also attack people passing through crime scenes, even if the scene is that of somebody being murdered in the stairwell.
• Police Are Useless: The Enforcers are a privatized police force owned by the Starch Kola company. They don't seem interested in actually solving crimes, they just seal off crime scenes and even outsource arrests to citizen contractors. Enforcers mainly exist as obstacles to your investigation, making it tricky to collect clues.
• Private Detective: You are one, doing investigations and odd jobs for money. The fact that you can go nab murderers yourself for a bonus introduces some overlap with the Bounty Hunter trope.
• Procedural Generation: The city you play in is randomly generated from a seed, creating buildings, citizens, and companies. As the game continues, it will decide various events that will happen, including every Serial Killer and their targets... but if you reload to before these events occur, they will happen again with different parameters (building, victim, suspect, etc).
• Produce Pelting: Humiliation jobs task you with throwing food at the target and taking a photo of them afterwards.
• Purely Aesthetic Gender: Technically it's not quite aesthetic, as a character's gender is recorded on their paperwork and can be used to verify their identity. Apart from that, there is no gameplay effect; all characters are equally likely to be criminals or victims regardless of gender. NPCs will complain at you if they spot you in a bathroom that doesn't match your registered gender, though.
• Regenerating Health: Your health will slowly regenerate so long as you're not hungry or thirsty, speeding up if you're rested, well-fed, and/or hydrated, but it's not fast enough to rely on in combat. It does, however, counter bleeding.
• Released to Elsewhere: Implied. Everyone wants to earn entry to The Fields. But no one knows what The Fields look like or where they are exactly, and there's no way to contact anyone who lives there, and you can find multiple letters by citizens noting they've never heard back from friends or family who have retired to the Fields despite promises to keep in touch. Citizens who are relocating to The Fields are also required to transfer all of their money and property to another citizen before they leave.
• Religion of Evil: The Red Gums are Social Darwinist cultists who teach dubiously existent Black Magic to get ahead...and thus, can result in cultic Serial Killer cases.
• Retirony: It's not uncommon to find emails in a victim's computer talking about how they were ready to retire. Of course, the UAS being the Crapsack World that it is, said retirement requires them to put in a 10 months notice first.
• Retro Universe: The intro cutscene mentions that it's "the late twentieth century", and the game certainly looks it. Payphones and CRT monitors abound.
• Room Full of Crazy: Particularly unhinged killers may have apartments absolutely covered in crumpled notes and papers, with each one having writings alluding to their killings in some way.
• Schizo Tech: Gramophones and black-and-white televisions coexist alongside desktop computers with color monitors, handheld fingerprint scanners, hovering trains, and genetic engineering. The analogue for the internet is a pneumatic tube network.
• Schmuck Bait: It's possible to purchase a SyncDisk from a Starch Kola machine called Sugar Daddy. It costs only 5 crows, but gives you 5,000 crows just for installing it... and also a condition called Starch Kola Addiction that gives you increasing Interface Screw the longer you go without drinking a Kola or if you dare to drink any other liquid. This penalty applies even while sleeping, ensuring you'll wake up from any long rest with a rapidly disorienting screen unless you have Kola on hand. Oh, and don't think of trying to have it removed; unlike other SyncDisks, it actually costs money to have it uninstalled. 6,000 crows in specific, though it can be discounted by drinking Kola. By the exact same amount it costs to buy each Kola.
• Sentry Gun: The cornerstone of private security systems in Shadows of Doubt. Even the smaller, less wealthy apartment buildings can have them.
• Serial Killer: Every murder case is from one of these. Over time, they will claim more lives until you eventually catch them, using their Calling Cards to figure them out.
• Set Swords to "Stun": Hitting somebody over the head with a knife or a sword will only make them unconscious. They won't even bleed, either.
• Sherlock Scan: One of the sync discs allows you to perform a limited version of this, such as finding out somebody's salary just by looking at them. This is justified, however, by the disc connecting you to a database.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: Shotgun-wielding citizens are some of the most dangerous enemies to face, as they can easily knock you out in just a few shots. Fortunately, they're very rare, and it's possible to finish the game without ever getting attacked by one.
• Shout-Out: The icon for "Coming Through", the Steam achievement for KOing someone by kicking in a door, is a pixelated version of the "Here's Johnny!" scene from The Shining.
• Show Within a Show: When a television is turned on, it's possible for it to play scenes from in-universe shows. We're only shown still slides to represent the visuals, but the audio is fully recorded.
  • There is Claw of The Fathoms, a crime drama Film Noir, which sounds exactly like what you'd expect from a Film Noir in this alternate reality, with seven scenes available to watch.
  • The other major show is baseball games (spelled Bas Boule in-universe), which are dynamically driven by playing the commentary snippets in different sequences, so the game and it's progression will be different every time the show comes on.
• Sniper Rifle: Sniper rifles do a lot of damage (whether when an NPC shoots you, or you beat somebody with one), but are fortunately quite rare. They're also used by sniper killers, so if you're investigating a case and find a sniper rifle (or rifle ammo) on a citizen, they're probably the killer.
• Socially Scored Society: The social credit score system is used to track a citizen's contributions to society. You start at 1, and you need a certain score (depending on game length) before you can apply to retire to The Fields.
• Status Effects: Various types pop up over time, affecting various aspects of your character.
  • Being cold from the snow or air vents slowly drains your health.
  • Hunger and thirst will stop you from Regenerating Health.
  • Bleeding will deal damage over time.
  • A bruise will cause incoming damage to be increased.
  • Being wet from the rain or a shower can make you slip if you run on certain surfaces.
  • Being stinky from being close to bad-smelling objects or simply not showering will make you easier to detect.
  • Coffee can energise you, increasing movement speed.
  • Being hydrated boosts the rate of your Regenerating Health.
• String Theory: Your case notes menu is represented like this. Once you've discovered a piece of evidence, you can pin it to the board to refer back to later; related pins are automatically connected with string, or you can make your own connections manually.
• Stupid Crooks: Murderers use the same dialogue system as every other character, so there's a chance that if you show them a photo of their victim, they'll mention seeing them...at the exact time and place they were murdered, which is basically a confession. Worse yet, some of them, if confronted in their apartments, will grant you their fingerprint and/or even let you look around, allowing you to gather all the rest of the evidence you need to put them away.
• Super Window Jump: You can do this if you need to leave somewhere in a hurry. Breaking out windows and leaping through them will be problematic for you early on, but it is possible to buy augmentations that reduce falling damage, making this a more viable strategy as you progress.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: In spades.
  • Most detective work will consist of sifting through piles of paperwork to find the info that you need. The easiest way to find someone's address is to look them up in the local equivalent of the Yellow Pages.
  • The protagonist is a Private Detective, not a cop, much less a Cowboy Cop; as far as the law is concerned, you're just an unusually nosy civilian. This means you're not allowed to waltz around crime scenes with impunity, as it's considered trespassing. Before the Cheats and Liars update, you also couldn't publicly arrest people, as it was considered assault; that changed when the update dropped, and now you can cuff people in broad daylight if you've got probable cause to believe they're the murderer.
  • Climbing through ventilation ducts isn't silent, and it causes you to become cold over time.
  • Soft Glass is averted; punching out a glass window can injure your hand. Trying to pull an "Open!" Says Me by kicking down a locked door can also injure your foot, on top of being extremely noisy. On the flip side, should you break open the door and someone is on the other side, you will knock them out cold because a 50-100lb. piece of wood being shoved open in their face is not good for their health.
  • We Buy Anything is also averted; only dedicated pawn shops will buy items from you.
  • Turning your flashlight on makes you more visible, though less so than turning the room lighting on.
  • Some odd jobs may ask you to get a photograph of someone. Usually, the mark won’t be happy about you randomly taking a photo of them for what seems like no reason, and will quickly try to beat you up over it.
  • Mucking about in the flooded sewer levels will give you the Stinky debuff (until you can shower), which will be a problem if you're trying to remain inconspicuous.
  • Killings are rarely truly random; while motives aren't always clear, just like in real life, many victims are killed by people they know, like friends, coworkers, and neighbors. There is almost always a connection.
• Suspect Is Hatless: Sometimes, the arrest jobs give you amusingly little to go on. As an example, you might be provided only the target's blood type, salary, and lack of facial hair with which to start searching for them. Particularly unhelpful cases will start you with nothing but a blood type and a building, and expect you to get a suspect out of that.
• Tactical Door Use: While NPCs are able to open doors normally, you can buy a door wedge from City Hall that jams any door you place it on until it's removed, allowing you to (for example) search an apartment in peace while the occupant is away, without worrying that they'll come home and catch you while you're still inside.
• Tae Kwon Door: While just opening or closing a door is harmless, a door that's been kicked open will knock out any NPC in its swing arc. You can exploit this by knocking on a door, waiting for someone on the other side to unlock it, and then kicking it. Because unlocked doors are kicked open in one hit, the person on the other side will be knocked out in one blow.
• They Look Just Like Everyone Else!: Killers are picked at random and are treated exactly like normal citizens, except that they sometimes go out and murder people. Thus, the killer may turn out to be the pawn shop worker you constantly sell stuff to, your loan shark, the sync clinic doctor whose services you frequently used, and more.
• Thou Shall Not Kill: While the detective can attack, arrest, rob, and mug basically anyone they want, the player is absolutely forbidden from actually killing anyone. The most you can do is knock them out cold.
• Throwing Your Sword Always Works: Any item you can pick up can be thrown, including melee weapons. It's hard to hit with, unless you're using a large object (such as a chair), but if you do hit, the target will instantly fall unconscious.
• Totally Not a Criminal Front: Illegal businesses will disguise themselves as legitimate businesses, even having a city directory entry and employee records. However, they're easily given away by the fact that some of these names aren't used by legitimate businesses (banks, for instance, aren't a thing), and their addresses usually being in basements or in back alleys behind a wooden fence (not used by legal businesses). They also leave graffitis in public, which state what password they use, which kinda defeats the point of having a password.
• Trauma Inn: A variant in that sleeping by itself won't make you heal faster. However, it gives you the well-rested effect, which increases your maximum health and its regeneration.
• Unwanted False Faith: The Red Gums, fanatical Darwinian social climbers and worshipers of Starch Kola founder Eden Krueger. Eden never acknowledged them, but that didn't stop them from making blood sacrifices to him and assassinating a rival CEO.
• Unwinnable by Mistake: Stolen items exist in the game world even before you take the side gig to recover them. If you already broke into the thief's home, stole the stolen item, and sold it off to the pawn shop without realizing it was a quest item, you can still take the recover the item side gig even though finishing the quest is now impossible.
• Urban Segregation: Every UAS city is informally split into three layers by social status:
  • The Fathoms encompass the basement levels of a building, which are dilapidated and partially flooded, plus any street slums. Unlicensed businesses, criminals, undesirables, and the homeless reside here.
  • The Myriads extend from street level to a building's middle floors. This is where the vast majority of a city's inhabitants live and work.
  • The Echelons cover a building's middle up to the penthouse, rising above the cloud of pollution that shrouds every city. Echelon residents are the wealthy social elite. Echelon floors are also exclusive, with a purple hologram that is illegal to pass unless your social credit is high enough.
• Useless Security Camera: Security cameras are pretty good at spotting crimes in progress (which mostly means crimes done by you). When it comes to footage, though, they only take photos once every few minutes (possibly with differences of hours), making it possible for a killer to avoid being caught on tape if they get lucky.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: There's nothing stopping the player from being an absolute menace between investigations, smashing windows, knocking out and looting random civilians, and stealing everything that isn't nailed down. Hell, some jobs even pay you to do so. There's even an achievement for knocking out every single citizen in a city at least once.
• Vigilante Man: Citizens will often take the initiative to attack you for commiting crimes, even if they have nothing to do with your victim.
• Will Talk for a Price: If a citizen refuses to tell you info, you can try to bribe them for it. The standard rate is 50 crows and you double it each time they refuse.
• With This Herring: On top of the issues mentioned under Suspect Is Hatless above (getting missions with absurdly few clues), you're also just a civilian with no authority. You can only legally search a location if you get the suspect's permission, and for equipment, you start with just a watch, a flashlight, and a fingerprint scanner. You even have to buy your own handcuffs and weapons...and if you get in trouble, don't even think about backup coming.
• Worst Aid: Starch Kola's eponymous product was originally marketed as a cure for radiation sickness during the Mustard War.