Shadows of Doubt lets you solve murders, ensuring the guilty party faces justice. But can you kill people yourself?
That’s not to say we’re endorsing going around slaughtering people but let’s just say that you’re caught sneaking around an apartment and want to do away with a witness. Can you? Can you kill people in Shadows of Doubt?
The answer is no, you can’t kill people in Shadows of Doubt. You can only handcuff them and render them unconscious. It doesn’t matter whether you attack someone with your fists, a kitchen knife, whatever you use.
You can knock people out, though they will get back up again. But killing them is not an option. Why? For a start, it doesn’t quite fit with the tone of the game. Secondly, as the developer has pointed out, killing people messes with the game’s procedural systems.
Could killing be patched in later? It’s possible, but even if the developer did change their mind, there’d be a lot of work involved in tweaking the game to handle it. What happens, for example, if you accidentally kill a key witness?
And what about the general population? What if you kill so many people the city becomes a ghost town? As is, if you started killing people it would risk unbalancing and maybe even breaking the game.
So you can’t kill people in Shadows of Doubt and we doubt (sorry) that’s going to change.
