Shadows of Doubt – General Strategy

How to start solving crimes and getting money and SyncDisks.

SyncDisks to Get

Note: Credit goes to HERE'S JONNY

Gun for the Beauty SyncDisk and max out the “Charm” path as fast as you can. Once that’s done, practically everyone will be giving you their name and fingerprints and letting you into their house for free.

This latter part is the most useful by far. For making people swoon with your sharp jawline and beautiful eyelashes, people will let you into their house for free, and that includes letting you read all their private notes (which usually includes their personal code and work schedule) and personal data (which you can usually find in the wardrobe in the bedroom). Note that you can also steal anything in their wallet, as well as anything lying around so long as they aren’t looking. This includes anything their safe contains. This stealing will be your main source of SyncDisks and upgrade vials imo. You can also log into their personal computer to fill in more info about them.

Before you acquire Beauty, other optimal times to get into people’s apartments include when they’re not at home (probably working), or at night when they’re asleep (very annoying and risky, as you’ll have to snoop around in the dark, using your fingerprint scanner for light). I find vents unreliably random and so prefer to just lockpick doors.

As for the other aspect, keep asking random strangers on the street for their name and you can build up quite the people catalog. It may not be massively useful but who knows if it’ll provide a lucky bit of assistance at some point.

The other SyncDisks are somewhat optional. The ones I like to go for, in rough order of importance:

• Infiltrator: “Hacker” path. Very useful if infiltrating a workplace as the normal timer is kinda short.
• Community: “Care in the Community” path. Side jobs refer to any cases that are not murders, and they are the main source of income for me. An extra 20% boost at max level is pretty sweet.
• Constitution: tbh I play with all debuffs off anyway cos I’m a noob. But if debuffs are on, this will probably save quite some hassle. With debuffs off, this is a great source of extra inventory space.
• Dove+: Perhaps only marginally useful for gathering more info, but it gives info nonetheless. I like to only install it if I have saved up vials to immediately upgrade it to the last tier where the negative effect gets removed. I like to go for the “Physiological Perception” if only because it helps to 100% complete a person’s profile, but you may find “Socioeconomic Perception” T1 to be useful as well (but note that it needs you to see people in person, relationships are currently not tracked in profiles, and you’re likely to recognize relationship status by discovering that they live together anyway, or just ask them).
• Trespasser: “Lockpicker” path – less time spent means less time for the cameras or people to sound the alarm. Don’t bother with “Resourceful” as you’ll soon have enough money to buy tons of lockpicks from the vending machine. I thought “Invisible” was a great path, but maybe it’s bugged rn and the cameras will still complain about you anyway.
• Ambassador Scheme: “Cash Flow” path. The trickle of money is honestly too small to be majorly useful once you get your first 1-3 cases done, but hey it’s passive income, which means you can just sleep in bed for days in order to farm up some money.

What Side Jobs to Take

First off, you can close any incomplete case without penalty. You can only have up to 5 cases open at a time, and closing cases that are very difficult to make progress in is probably wise to make space for fresher cases.

Second of all, if you have a selection of job types or rewards that you don’t like, you can take up a case and immediately close it to remove it from the bulletin at no cost. Once the number of jobs on the bulletin falls below a certain number (4 or 5), new jobs will appear. [Unconfirmed: It may just be the same people requesting the same jobs. I suspect this because I’ve been rerolling for a while but didn’t get any new Arrest jobs.]

With that out of the way, I like the Arrest job best, and Theft job second. Because they tend to pay well and don’t involve violence.

Arrests are very straightforward: ID the person and handcuff them.

IDing someone can range from very easy to very laborious. The easiest cases are when you’re given their phone number which you can simply call and then look up in the city directory, or workplace which you can raid the employee records of. Initials are relatively easy to work with too. Just any combination of info that narrows down the possibilities to a handful which you can then manually locate one at a time is good.

Handcuffing someone is actually very easy: Wait till they’re home, knock on the door, then when they open it (and make sure their partner if any isn’t nearby), have your handcuffs ready, rush into the entrance and handcuff them from behind.

Another method (if their partner is around): you can just trespass into their house to provoke them into pursuing you (they won’t do much; just chase you and punch you, which you can tank no problem), run up/down the stairwell away from them, then run back towards them once the pursuing stops. Ideally they’ll be somewhere along the stairwell and facing away from you to get back to their apartment, which is a prime position for handcuffing.

Note that the public will take issue to you handcuffing someone, so do it when no one’s around. Cameras are okay afaik.

Thefts (presented as “a corporate client wanting an individual to look into a business matter”) may be straightforward as well. Getting the actual job details is kinda annoying, but relatively not a big deal.

You have to ID a person and steal a document from them. If you’re lucky (and this happens rather often), just get to their house, ask for permission to enter, and the item (labelled “secret envelope”) will be lying around somewhere, and you can swipe it at any opportune time.

In the past I’ve also done it by raiding their workplace at night, which is a lot harder with the strong security systems in place.