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.