Shadows of Doubt

Shadows of Doubt

58 ratings
How to Solve Any Job
By Wolfmeme
Ever feel like you've been given too little information on how to find someone for a job? Here's how to actually get anywhere.
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Word of Warning
I feel I should make it known that this will absolutely spoil probably one of the best 'eureka' moments the game can offer you, and it being an immersive sim in general, it can often feel much better figuring this kind of thing out on your own. If you're this far into the guide, you've already gotten enough of a hint that you probably don't have to run all over the city just to find a person who fits the bill, and likely still be wrong. But, you've been warned. If you continue passed here, you want the answer, and it's there for you.
Assumptions
First off, this guide assumes you don't have enough information to reasonably figure out who fits the specifications. If you have a full name, address, workplace, photo ID, or even phone number, each of these are plenty for figuring out who they are, with perhaps the photo ID and phone number needing methods that you might not have figured out. If you have well enough information on the person- just go solving the case as standard, you'll be much, much faster.

Next, this isn't a guide on murder cases, but instead the jobs you'll find beside payphones. Bluntly, I'm separating this from murder cases because several of the main vital factors for how you go about things are massively different. Not least of which being that murders tend to give you much more information on 'Unknown Citizen' than ~3-4 data points.

Lastly, this just covers the hard parts and assumes you already know how to deal with finding a marked document, person, place, etc., the standard ways, just usually with more information. The point of this guide is to teach you how to get the extra information you vitally need when you otherwise don't have it.
The Answer
So, at very minimum, you've been given a few things by the job listing, in this case, we're assuming things you genuinely cannot act on, like say being given only age, height and hair color for example. Even if say- the hair color is distinctive or rare, finding someone who fits the bill by running all over the city is exhausting and not worth your time when there could be hundreds of people you'll stumble into. So, with all that said, we'll turn to the job listing. It's still sitting there right in the case, unless you've unpinned it for some reason. I recommend you don't, because that's where we can get our answers.

Instead of looking for who you're told, you're now going to snoop on the fool who gave you this job you don't have enough actionable information to accomplish. You can go to the connections on the job listing and pin the 'unknown citizen' that gave you the job in the first place. At this point, I'm sure you can see where this is going. You should already have some form of actionable information on the job giver. For example, if they asked you to meet someplace like a bar and find them with X, you already have their appearance. In future, you'll likely want to inspect these people as you meet them so that you don't have to go running around after the fact, and pin them to your board. If they don't give you enough info, you can still follow them home, which is much easier than running around to people asking if they've seen them, or trying to follow them with the camera towers that only take pictures sometimes every 5-? minutes.

Things can get much more complicated though if they've only given you information over the phone. All you have is their voice... and phone number because they just called you on that phone. So far as I can tell, 541-0000 doesn't work on payphones, not that it matters much, but now's the time to look at outgoing and incoming calls in a phone box somewhere to figure out where the call came from. Tall buildings often have this in their basement, while the bars and locations that are effectively their own building often has this as an additional building outside the main one while still being on the land. If this is still a pain, you can just call from a phone in a building where you do know the call box of and just use that, assuming you can't just call the number and have them just freely give their name of course. That said, I'm also pretty sure that the first three digits of each phone number is shared through the entire building it came from, so once you've some experience and time in the city you've generated, you might be able to know the spot on the grid to start looking.

This all works because... I mean, was this person going to order whatever the job is on some guy they don't know for giggles, paying out thousands of crows? No, they're going to want you to mess with someone they know for some reason. If you don't find any leads on their v-mail or in their home, you'll have to go hunting for people who meet the specifications at their place of work or wherever they tend to be.
The Advanced Answers
But of course, that's not all you'll be faced with. I've had a case where I've confusedly looked through every single person a guy knew who gave me a job, and yet didn't have one match... then I looked into their significant other, who did. From what I can tell, people will put up jobs for other people. In other words, welcome Shadow's of Doubt's boogeymen.

MIDDLEMEN.

Many jobs will have someone other than the person who necessarily wants the job done get it to you. This adds another layer to this. This can, and will cause your jobs to practically balloon both in difficulty, and just how much absurd work you have to put into just one. Bluntly, if you do these, you're doing it for the challenge because you could easily bang out 2 cases with half as much each in an hour if you were really dragging your feet or being paranoid of being wrong.

Now to get into actually dealing with them. Sometimes, you're lucky. You'll have the guy you talk to in a discreet location you meet directly reference the fact that they're giving the job for someone else, which I hope you remember because the game doesn't record this for your case board so far as I can tell. Some people aren't so kind. In any case, there's a good couple ways this can go, and all of them introduce their own complications and different routes you have to take to meet back at the same point... just so that you can find the actual guy all of this is related to, until you finally find Unknown Citizen.

Let's start with by far the easiest to sort through. You get the job, call the number, they tell you to meet somewhere, you meet, they give you the details, probably in a briefcase. You scan what the case gave you, and realise it's about to be one of these cases, so you immediately loop back around to follow the guy or girl who just talked to you, who hopefully you inspected and pinned. You follow them home, or to their workplace, what have you, you may need to look through both. Follow standard methods for the most part, you want to look through their email, workspace, and for any notes, especially crumpled ones. Do not forget their workplace locker if one exists, get a codebreaker if you need to. What you're looking for is anything on the suspect of the job, or lacking that along with dawning on the realisation that this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ just added probably several hours to this case, you're looking for whoever put them up to giving you the job. If them and the people around them are lacking this, just to see if they have a significant other, as they can often be affiliated too.

That's the easy version. Thankfully, the main point where these all diverge is at the beginning, so most of this is just quickfire. If you're told to go to a place where a payphone will ring for you, I cannot recommend enough that you try to note the exact time it happened, as you'll need to look through the call box of that building to check what number called the payphone. Have fun figuring out the payphone's number if you want a headache. Now, the next two are pretty similar. When you're just given a briefcase at the payphone itself, or when you're told to ask around with the staff. In both cases, it's staff involvement, so you'll want to snoop out the computer/employees of that specific location for relations to someone else, obviously take fingerprints from the case if you get one, and compare it with the employees there until you figure out who touched that case.

Finally, the one that is different from the rest, because it's given out by the enforcers. You'll want to look at the name for the enforcer section as given by the job listing and pin it. You'll want to go to their specific office, all of which I've found in City Hall, and raid it for their information. There should be some link to the job somewhere from someone.
That's Really All There is to It.
That's it. That's the secret. Thanks for reading- and please stop complaining about there being unsolvable jobs when you just don't know any better... unless there is actually some reason or bug stopping you from doing it, then go ahead.
27 Comments
Wolfmeme  [author] 17 Feb @ 9:15am 
My only recommendation for that little information other than taking a trip to city hall and lobotomising yourself for 30 minutes to an hour is searching up all the businesses that job title can work at and going through them one by agonising one, which still isn't exactly fast, some can be in pretty much any business, and will probably be pretty slow.
Talks2Self 14 Feb @ 8:22am 
I love that you've put all that detail in there. It doesn't help with my particular problem but... Maybe?
I got an arrest job from the police. All I was given was perp job title, how much they make, and their height. So it's looking like I've got to know my city or I've got to figure out if I can reverse investigate the darned police department 😩 ugh...
Wolfmeme  [author] 29 Jul, 2024 @ 4:40pm 
That sounds fair enough, will get to that when I find the time.
Copper Boltwire 29 Jul, 2024 @ 1:55pm 
I agree with Frission, Better just add " (Spoliers) " in the name of the guide, and remove all them spoiler tags on the text itself.
generic hooman moat.gg 24 Jul, 2024 @ 1:12pm 
the real boogeyman is profiles that not only have a specific age and hair, but also have a condition beyond what you find prescriptions for, like migraines or insomnia, if you were able to input search terms other than just name into the government database it'd be a nonissue, but so far the only way these get finished is by getting a whole list of potential matches and looking at each citizens connections for being the target of the job posting
Frission 23 Jul, 2024 @ 10:59am 
Honestly it'd be nice if everything wasn't spoilered here, steam doesn't like to keep it visible no matter how I position my mouse :I By coming to a guide I'm ready for spoilers about things like this in the first place, so it's extremely unnecessary!
stun 28 Nov, 2023 @ 8:53am 
Frequency of the target being in the address book of the client feels extremely high to me
STANN.co 4 Jul, 2023 @ 11:36am 
i never thought to finger print the briefcases themselves. That's so cool. And plenty other cool stuff as well. I was beginning to get frustrated with limited information this is really cool details though
Goreling 13 May, 2023 @ 5:38pm 
There was one time where I just did the no snoopin on the job provider go get that person as a humiliation job. A bit slim on the hints but way enough to triangulate the person: built large, partner is some high rank job, building residence given. The only catch was that this residence did not have a security room to fetch tenant contracts so I found a match after some "stairway questioning"

But also next time if I'm stuck in this same kind of situation, I'll do the zero in with the... precautions this guide talked about. The game wouldn't check the photo box meaning it either bugged out or tossed me a dirty where there was more than one of that match in the residence.
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa 13 May, 2023 @ 11:44am 
I think I need to do this. All I had was 9% of the profile; medium build, O- blood type and works as a Sales Exec. I looked through businesses one by one, and had checked around 11 before just giving up for a different small mission.