Shadows of Doubt: How to Solve Any Job

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.

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.
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.

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.