What’s particularly notable about all of this, is that everything – the locations, the people, who they are, and how they interact – is procedurally generated by the game. Knowing this, you might walk by someone heading up the stairs in your building, when a thought crosses your mind: Who was that? Do they live here? And why are they walking up the stairs at 3am?Įverybody is Somebody in Shadows of Doubt. The simulation drills down on their hair, skin tone, gender, jobs – even going as deep as their fingerprints, their blood type, their shoe size. They eat, sleep, go to work, hang out, and generally interact with the world in their own ways. Not only that, every person inside those apartments is simulated as well. Every apartment is inhabited, every work desk matches up with an employee, and every shop sells its own wares.

A handful of streets are lined with buildings that reach for the stars, filled with apartments, office spaces, shops, elevators, ventilation, security systems, mailboxes – all of it. Shadows of Doubt gives you this small but extremely dense city to wander around in. Do you break down the door with guns blazing, or sneak in through the vent? Perhaps something different altogether? Image: GamesHub

This is often embodied through the lens of Immersive Sim games like Deus Ex and System Shock, where the player is given multiple options on how to approach any given goal. The benefit of the single city block idea is that it will let you approach objectives in any way of your choosing. Traditionally, this would be achieved through meticulously handcrafted scenarios – game designers create a space, think up the possible ways players may want to approach it, and then create bespoke options to account for each of them.

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