Shadows of Doubt has been in active development for 8 years and it hasn't stopped yet.
"That's weird, but I thought they released 1.0 already?"
Yes, yes they did.


It's a fully simulated experience, a lot of systems work in tandem here to provide the player with one whole world to experience. Problem is; where the game can provide a truly amazing experience if every single one of those systems work flawlessly, it definitely doubles down on absolute mayhem once one of them break.

And once you've started the third Savegame, after having the first two obliterated by some game breaking bug, that's when your frustration starts to suddenly trip over bumps in the rug you could previously gloss over:

Random clipping, ragdolls behaving like they've been introduced last patch, NPCs behaving... just... weirdly, Lack of polish in Dialogue System, Extremely inconsistent UI design (The Detective Board feels like a proof of concept tech demo with a pretty much lackluster skin), combat being unpleasant in all the wrong ways, parts of the simulation apparently just having either no or weirdly set configs (Not just "why did you write down your password on three different notes, why does your kitchen have more different kinds of IDs or random pieces of paper than food in it?", -since yes, someone might live like that- but rather "why the ♥♥♥♥ is it so common?", the fact that I still don't know if the in-game universe allows people to privately own weapons or not, game won't let me smoke, auto travel keeps feeding me brick because it keeps forgetting what corners are, etc, etc...

Now, none of this is important, not only in the "none of this is important, but you start to care once worse things have happened", but even the bigger picture isn't important-

At least not as important as the Devs simply going "welp, we worked on this for 8 years, 7 of those Jeffries just kinda made a mess, so ig we'll just try to patch this up a bit, add a few odds and ends in 2025 and then we can do cooler stuff in the next game."

Huh? Say again? I ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ paid for this!??

I get that there's a certain risk involved in purchasing early access products, I get that I only bought what the game would become, not what I expected it to.
The fact that I wasn't patient enough to wait until this thing went 1.0 doesn't make you owe me the 1.0 I wanted.
What I do get to expect though, and here comes the little ace up my little sleeve: is a game that will once deserve the price tag I paid for it.

This isn't a 25€ game.
This was a very promising EA project that I funded because its beta showed great promise.
Now it's just a tech demo with an exorbitant price tag.

I'm so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sorry.

The Long Dark is consistently the first and only survival game I can actually recommend to people legitimately interested in the genre.

It is incredibely refreshing to play a survival game that doesn't need obscure lore because you can manage to sustain yourself and, ♥♥♥♥ it, a town of 500 other people within the first 2 days of hardcore crafting.

The long dark isn't about a man who finds a way to live under the circumstances he's been put into, it's about a man who takes as long as he can to inevitably die.

You are not a master craftsman, you wont beat a wolf in hand-to-paw combat and you definitely don't have enough energy to chop down a whole forest to turn into the mansion you've always dreamed of.

You will sit in a dark room, no way of making light to effectively use your time, but also not tired enough to sleep, watching yourself starve because the innards of that deer you shot and took 15 minutes to find in the woods, only to take hours to carry it back to your current shelter, haven't dried fast enough to craft the pouch you needed to harvest this or the article of clothing you needed to get from here to there or whatever you needed to not have your run end just there. It's beautiful.

Oh, story might be good too ig. Didn't play it.