The Rise of The Golden Idol

I love games that let you play as a detective. Games that present players with a case, mystery, or murder they have to. Games that give little guidance and allow you to freely discover evidence and clues on your own. Games that reward analysis, deduction, and let you feel clever when you finally crack the case. Many games have had moments of investigation or trailing a lead. A good chunk of open world games have had at least one mission where you have to locate a body or the murderer. You look around the room for a few highlighted clues, follow a blood trail or scent of some sort, and come to a new scene. These are fine as they often serve as mission variations for these kinds of games, but these aren’t real investigations. You’re just following a string of linear events until you reach the point where the game gives you the answer, or acts like “Hey you just did it and some enemies appeared or here’s the quest reward,” or something at least along those lines. When I think of a good detective game I think of the traits I just listed seconds earlier. The player must analyze every detail they find, learn from discovery, take mental notes, and deduce what possibly happened. It's what makes a good detective game.

As much as I love these sorts of puzzlers there’s not a whole lot of them out there. Making these kinds of games are hard, because you need to think carefully about multiple aspects. How you go laying out the evidence. Making sure you give the player good hints on what to do without either being too vague or giving away the answer. How to set the scene, signaling when players should take notes, and maintaining good pacing so players don’t drop these games halfway through. It is difficult to make a good detective game. However, there have been recent attempts at developing better detective games. Hypnospace Outlaw is a game that not only attempts to simulate a 1990s webbrowser, but also challenges the player in finding information through a database. Earlier this year we received a game similar to it called The Roottrees are Dead. Where players must unravel a whole family tree through searching up historical articles dating all the way to a hundred years ago. While not entirely a detective game I can’t help but mention Lorelei and The Laser Eyes. A puzzle game where you uncover the truths of an uncanny hotel manor, and unravel the life of its several residents. Now an all time favorite indie for me.

We’ve seen an uprising in detective games, but my choice for the greatest detective game of all time will always be Return of The Obra Dinn. I have talked heavily about this game in the past. It set the benchmark on how to make these kinds of games. Great pacing, scene setup, presentation of info, a well written mystery, and lets you feel clever every step of the way without feeling confused or that it’s presenting info too easily to you. Return of The Obra Dinn is a masterpiece, but today’s subject matter is not on Obra Dinn. Which will probably make you wonder why I even opened the review up like this. No, today’s subject matter is on The Rise of The Golden Idol. Sequel to Case of The Golden Idol developed by Color Gray Games and released back in 2022. The sequel was released just last year and had quite a bit of hype leading up to its release. Most game sequels nowadays take awhile to make, and in the case of indie game sequels I’d say the average development time is three to five years. The developers need time to learn what needs to be expanded on, and not make the same game again but worse. The Rise of The Golden Idol took two years.

I remember playing the original Golden Idol all the way back in 2023. It wasn’t until a year after release I heard about the game’s existence. How it was the closest thing to recapturing any of the magic Return of The Obra Dinn had. I was excited. I bought the game upon hearing that phrase alone and played it within a single weekend. It was an alright game, and I walked away feeling slightly disappointed. There was something about Golden Idol that failed to click me in the same way games like Return of The Obra or Chants of Sennaar did. How it’s mystery was more of you witnessing a series of chronological events rather than piece things together. How the scope of each scene grew out of control to the point I felt overwhelmed. This overwhelmingness leads to me feeling more confused rather than clever when piecing things together. Golden Idol isn’t bad, far from it. I rated the game an 8/10 in 2023, and looking back I still do. It just didn’t click with me, and when I heard the devs were making a sequel I hoped they would fix it’s flaws. That or hope I’d click with it this time. Bought the game when it initially released and refunded when I realized that I wasn’t having fun. Rebought it on sale, beat it, and can now say it was… alright. I will say now that it’s not a step back. Between both games I prefer this one more, but it still has a lot of the same problems.  So let’s talk about this. Let’s talk about why I think Golden Idol is a good game, but fails to be a good detective experience in my humble opinion.

Story

I can’t really talk about the narrative to a game whose selling point is learning what is going on. I may have my criticisms with The Rise of The Golden Idol, but doing this feels like a disservice to the vision the developers are going for. The best I can say is that the Golden Idol from the last game has returned after having rotted away on a dusty shelf for hundreds of years. People have gained possession of it and are now trying to harness the powers the Idol possesses. All the while chaotic things happen, murders arise all over the place, and investigators are trying to figure out the cause of all this. That is the most I can say, because the plot truly gets crazy after you finish the first chapter. A narraative I'd argue is even more interesting. The Rise of The Golden Idol is best experienced going in blind and figuring out the mysteries yourself. Onto the next section on how the game works.

Gameplay

The Rise of The Golden Idol is made up of five chapters. All composed of multiple levels where you must analyze a scene. There will be a bunch of people screaming about, chaos is happening all over, and you must deduce what caused it. Clicking on people lets you see what’s in their pockets and read what they were saying during the time of the event. You can also click certain objects to see what hides inside them, or travel to other rooms to see what is going on at the same time. Whenever you open up a speaking character or notes they carry you to obtain words. Each of these words are labeled different colors to signal objects, individuals with names, actions, etc. Once enough words are gained you can then start filling out pages. Notes on who each of these individuals are, evidence, and trying to deducing what happened. It’s very important you look at each scene carefully. Pay attention to characters addressing other characters, note exclaiming the different names, and much more. Realistically someone wouldn’t shout their own name out loud. You must use deduction and at times take an educated guess. It’s like Return of The Obra Dinn and how at times you had to guess there too, and just like in Return of The Obra Dinn the game locks in your answers when you get them right. A green icon appears when they are all correct, a red one appears when several answers are wrong, and a yellow one appears when two or less of the answers are wrong. I will admit I like this aspect of The Golden Idol. It’s not as good as when Return of The Obra Dinn rates murders on how easier they are  to determine now you have better evidence. It does its job though and I like it.

The biggest tip I suggest is getting the small pieces of a scene out of the way. Get every name of each core individual and evidence, because the real challenge is filling out the brief description on what happened. Who caused this, what they did, and how it led to the current events you see before you. This is much harder than guessing names and evidence, and will challenge how you comprehended everything. All you paid attention to, read on, and pieced together. If you do get stuck there is a hint system that gives you guidance without straight out giving you the answer. I respect the developers doing so because a majority of players play the game as intended. Once a scene is complete you move onto the next and so on. The game is as straightforward as it seems, but will test you in different ways. Whether that’s introducing new knowledge, adding info onto things you knew before, or introducing a new mechanic scene. It’s varied enough so that the process of uncovering mysteries never gets old. A good core gameplay and for me that’s all the game needs to be a certified good title. Why isn’t it great? What’s holding it back for me?

Thoughts

The Rise of The Golden Idol is a good game I wish I could’ve loved more. The passion is there, and some effort has been made to improve upon The Case of The Golden Idol setup. The most major change of course being the visual glow-up. Gray Color Games have moved from pixelated visuals to hand drawn characters and backgrounds while not losing the visual identity that made the original game unique. I remember criticizing the art style of the original, but I have come to like it. In an age where games are constantly competing on who can be the most technically impressive it’s nice to see games with unique art direction and identity. Golden Idol has just that with characters and scenery with uncanny sense to them. It was like someone was trying to draw realistic portraits, but the paint smudged a little and now there’s some wackiness to ‘em. Have you ever read an old MAD magazine before, or seen that Cartoon Network adaptation they tried to have back in the day? It sorta feels like that where an artist was told to make it look good and bad at the same time. The zaniness of it all is further captured by how whenever you click on a character they move to match what they are doing. If someone is in a frantic argument you see their portrait wiggle back and forth like a worm. The art style is pretty good overall and one of the few reasons I prefer The Rise of The Golden Idol slightly more than the original.

Another reason I prefer this game more is how it slightly feels more like a mystery this time around. There’s more cases following you figuring out what happened to a dead individual. You piece together who they are, where they came from, and what happened. The first few hours are good,  because it’s just done over and over. Expanded upon through difficulty and the setup to the scene. That is just where my high praises end. The Rise of The Golden Idol is better than the original, but how much it managed to improve or fix isn’t a lot. It’s honestly the same game but with more content. It took me a longer time to complete Rise compared to Case, and for some people that’s a good thing. The Case of The Golden Idol was twelve chapters alone, and Rise is about double its length. You are getting a plump puzzler to pick away, and for twenty US dollars that is an instant sale for folks. However, with its runtime now being doubled it’s allowed me to understand clearly why I didn’t adore these games the same way as Return of The Obra Dinn, The Roottrees are Dead, Chants of Sennaar, etc. The Rise of The Golden Idol is longer but has more of what made me critical of the first game, and in some cases I feel as though they doubled down on it. To a point I feel like its last puzzles are too bloated or not worth taking time to solve.

Let us start with my biggest criticism with these games first. They advertise Golden Idol as if it were a detective game. That you are unraveling this great mystery and lead up to a penultimate event. The last game really wasn’t all that of a mystery, and the sequel despite having a bunch of scenes where you have to unravel what’s going on isn’t much of one either. I’ll be comparing this game to Return of The Obra Dinn a lot, and I will admit it’s unfair of me to do so. Gray Color made a good game here, and they shouldn’t alter their vision to match that of another. Maybe some people prepare the structure of this game over Obra Dinn, and that is fine. In Obra Dinn the events you unraveled were done in a nonchronological order. The first chapter is actually the last set of events, and the first set of events is discovered midway through. It really made it feel like you were unraveling these strange events. Letting the pieces fall into place until you get a full image. It helped hype up the next chapter because you never knew where in the story you were getting placed into. Literally after the first chapter you get placed in the middle of a kraken attack. When this happened I knew I was in for a wild ride. The same can’t be said for either of The Golden Idol games. All the events are in chronological order, which kinda removes the sense of pinning down an ultimate case. You feel less like a detective and more like an onlooker. It’s a feeling I can’t properly describe. You just have to play all three games yourself to understand what I mean. There’s a very good video by Video Games are Bad that talks about this well. How events in Golden Idol aren’t very surprising and the greatest twists are predictable seeing how the last chapter gives enough clues of what to expect in the next. The moment your player can start predicting what occurs signals something went wrong.

Another thing I’m critical of is how the game handles player guessing. How guessing characters or evidence is done in huge blocks. It feels nice when you figure it out, but before that it feels a tad too overwhelming. You might have eight different characters you need to guess, and if it’s wrong you feel confused on what part it was. You went through a bunch of busywork to fill the whole thing, and now two or three answers are incorrect. If the blocks were smaller or done in chunks I’d feel like I wouldn't be so overwhelmed when processing information. There’s a reason why Return of The Obra Dinn was condensed when it came to filling out info. It wanted the discovery process to be challenging, but easy to organize. When a murder scene is done a book opens up. Having you fill a brief description on who died and how. It was an easy format that worked. Of course in real life you have to write the whole thing, but from a design point of view it doesn’t let the player sit there aimlessly. The game locks in the answer every time you guess three fates correctly, allowing for the pacing of the game to be pleasurable. You made good progress in small doses, which I feel a real life detective would go through. In Golden Idol it is all or nothing. You either guess a whole hugeass chunk correctly or don’t get it. My least favorite part of each puzzle was when it came to filling out the whole descriptions.

The event window is usually a whole paragraph. You must use every word you obtained to now describe what occurred, and just like filling out the names if more than two words are wrong you can’t lock in your answers. These parts are usually where I give up, because sorting through not just names but also a whole list of nouns, verbs, and actions isn’t fun. Guessing a paragraph rather than chunks of it is not fun. It feels like information overload with how much is presented at once to me. In every single case of Obra Dinn murder scenes are always condensed. You could move around in them, but there was always a barrier or character blocking your way from entering other parts of the ship. That was because Lucas Pope knew if he were to make scenes too big the tiny details would be glossed over. It makes the “ahah” moment feel satisfying rather than finally stumbling upon and thinking “Oh thank god there’s that stupid piece of info I needed so much.” Much harder to do in Golden Idol when you’re searching three rooms of evidence all of which contain several notes or characters with pockets full of evidence. Chants of Sennaar, a game about language, does this better by opening a journal when it knows the player has enough groundwork to work off of to guess what each of the words mean.

As any video game goes the difficulty ramps up with time, and Golden Idol has a weird difficulty curve compared to most puzzle games I play. It does test the knowledge you’ve gained up till that point, but it also grows so much in scope you don’t feel motivated to solve a problem. You stare at it, get overwhelmed, and give up or look up the answer. I want to remind you this is all a review. This is my opinion and my opinion will not match that of another reviewer. I really hate saying this because it makes me look like a noncredible writer, but at the end of the game I just looked up the answers for the last puzzles. I couldn’t be bothered to sit through them and sort through info spread across not just numerous rooms of evidence, but also a map and different timed events. I could not be bothered to sit through more of a structure of detective investigation and design I wasn’t a huge fan of. Golden Idol is a game I really wanted to like, and instead I just thought it was alright. I’d give it a soft recommendation at best. Read up on whether this game is for you or not. At the end I give The Rise of The Golden Idol an 8/10 for being good.

8/10, Enjoyable