The Rise Of The Golden Idol review: a fiendish but forthright detective mystery whose mystery you’ll want to unravel

Published:

Here’s a quote from Steam: “The Rise Of The Golden Idol is the best game I’ve ever played, and I spent most of my time staring at the screen and saying ‘well, I had a good time panting'” is this it?Then?!” Crazy but fair, this detective puzzle requires a heady mix of observation, deduction and logic, but rewards you with an increasingly engaging story and increasingly annoyingly brilliant puzzles. Despite the fact that the tutorial will teach you everything you need to know , with each up-to-date chapter it introduces up-to-date wrinkles and twists. My verdict? Imagine me lying on the floor, massaging my temple with one hand and the other I show a fat thumbs up.

- Advertisement -

The first scene takes place in a dingy mental hospital, where a nurse desperately crawls towards a baton while a patient strangles her with a belt. In later scenes we will have to answer the “why” and more, but for now our task is to reveal the “who”, “what” and “where”. Certain features and other points of interest are highlighted and examining them displays a selection of related words in our word box. Many of these words are useless. Some of them are not. For example, a nurse’s name tag has his name on it. “Ah,” we think. “This will be useful for the ‘name’ target.” We drag his name under his portrait and feel like Dale Cooper.


Image source: Color Gray Games/Stone Paper Shotgun.

But what if we’re wrong, eh? We won’t actually know until we fill out all the fields All names. The game will tell us if we have “two or less” incorrect, but otherwise it’s a gigantic, fat “wrong” symbol and let’s go back to the word box. But let’s say we know how badges work and sort them without any problem? Then go to “events”: “‘Occupation’, ‘namesake’, killed ‘nickname handle’ with ‘object’ from ‘other object’ in ‘named location.’ Drag the right words to the right places and, call yourself your relative, you will solve the matter. These types of context clues (“name”, “location”) are not on the sheet itself, but the game provides some assistance, both through syntax and color coding of certain word categories. For example, names are always red.

The most significant thing the game needed to address, in my opinion, is not to make the multiple-choice detective work too basic to brute-force. One way to achieve this is to simply have too many viable options. After completing the tutorial, you’ll be exposed to at least half a dozen names, and many points of interest will contain additional words that either won’t be needed to solve the case at all, or will be so context-specific that anything but I need to figure out what’s going on happened to apply them correctly. On top of that, red herrings are full of stories about red herrings in stories you have to solve, rascal subplots specifically designed to throw you off track.

The reason these flubplots are so good at distracting you is that, like everything in Golden Idol, they’re all set in separate pieces of a larger story. Each scene describes not only the crime, conspiracy, or other event, but also the moments, and sometimes days, that led up to them. At first I felt confused because I had developed tunnel vision only for points of interest. But the game actually requires you to consider the entire scene, including parts of it that aren’t necessarily highlighted. A piece of fabric. Open window. What each person wears. You may not be able to check these things to add additional words to your collection, but they are still crucial to finally putting all the pieces together.

Each scene tells its own story, of course, but I think around the third chapter I started wanting to solve the individual scenes not just for their own satisfaction, but because I started to engage with the larger mystery. The plot jumps around in time, at one point showing returning characters at different points in their lives. It’s incredibly satisfying to start drawing connections based not only on what’s in front of you, but also on the context you’ve previously gleaned from the larger, unfolding mystery.


A woman tends a zen garden in
Image source: Color Gray Games/Stone Paper Shotgun

And that’s what makes “The Rise Of The Golden Idol” truly special – in my opinion – the way it extracts so much character and flavor from such a straightforward medium of interactivity. You can tackle your investigation safely, knowing you have all the tools to solve the scene, but still not feel confined or abandoned. This is a great example of simplistic design in one area – “fill in the blanks” – allowing for incredible variety and creativity in others.

I have a few gripes, but these are simply ease-of-use features I’d like to see. You’ll want to compare a lot of information, so open multiple windows at once. However, I couldn’t find an option to resize them, which resulted in a gigantic mess on the screen. At the end of each chapter you’ll fill out a different timeline of events, but you’ll still need to revisit scenes you’ve already played to remind yourself of the most significant information – more detailed summaries about them, which you can access from the scene selection menu where you do this, would be perfect.

That said, the most significant accessibility feature – at least as far as it goes as a reviewer who hasn’t played the previous game – has been tuned exactly as it should be. I took the hint Veryand they never once took away my sense of fun and mystery, and even the biggest ones still left me with a lot to chew on. In conclusion, I really don’t have anything too deep or insightful to say about this. “The Return of the Golden Idol” is a more enjoyable, satisfying, sometimes brain-deadening mystery that’s kind enough to match every time it makes you feel like a complete idiot, with another example of making you feel like a complete idiot. You feel like a genius.

Related articles