The Case of the Golden Idol Review (Prismer)
Easily the best detective game of 2022. If you’re at all into the genre, do yourself a favour and grab this!
This game is a great detective experience, and the closest we’ve had to Obra Dinn in the indie detective/investigation genre. So much so, in fact, that Lucas Pope, the creator of Obra Dinn, has highly praised The Case of the Golden Idol, a fact that is proudly displayed in their steam store page. And let me tell you: the praise is warranted! While the title probably did serve as inspiration for this game, both are quite different in terms of gameplay.
After you start each case, you usually are faced with a crime in some part of the map. Your goal is, thus, to discover what sequence of events led to that result. In order to accomplish that, the gameplay is divided into two halves: exploring and thinking. During exploring half you, well, explore! There are usually multiple screens you can see, and in each screen you can click through stuff to gather information and, perhaps most importantly, keywords that will be used later on in the thinking half. If you’re worried about these things being hard to locate, fret not: the game has an optional mode that highlights all clickable items, making them yellow if you still have information to uncover and red if you’ve found all there is to know.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2906410056
The thinking half does nothing to change the point and click style gameplay. It basically presents you with multiple scrolls that you must fill in. For most cases, one of these scrolls will have the sequence of events that happened in the map, with blanks that you must fill in with the keywords you located during the exploring half. Another one of these scrolls often contains every person in the map, with their names blanked out so that you can complete them. The last couple of scrolls vary a lot according to the map, but they all involve filling in blanks to uncover clues. It’s important to note one thing, though: there is usually only one obligatory scroll for you to fill, which is the sequence of events. Anything else is only there to support you.
See, once you fill each scroll, you get one of three feedbacks: either the scroll is complete, two or less names are wrong or it’s just plain wrong. If you’re not sure about the sequence of events from the get go - and trust me, you most likely won’t be - then it helps to fill the other scrolls in. Let me give you an example. In one map, a guest was poisoned. I already knew their identity, but I didn’t know how it had happened. One of the scrolls asked me to find out who was sitting in which position at the dinner table, so I decided to tackle that. Before tackling that, however, I needed to find out the guests’ names. Doing that and getting confirmation that I was correct allowed me to associate the names and certain traits that I found out about them while investigating to objects found on the table, which in turn allowed me to find out where the victim was sitting. I then got confirmation that the scroll was correct, which allowed me to see what the victim was consuming, find out the poisoned item, and mentally finish the sequence of events in my head. See? You don’t NEED to do the other scrolls as the game asks you only to complete the sequence of events, but the others are there to guide you, and they do a lot in that regard.
But this is far from being the only help you’ll get from the game. The cases are incredibly well interconnected, and some characters are involved in multiple of them. As such, knowledge from prior cases will help you a lot, and in some occasions will absolutely be required to complete all the data in each case. In a fascinating manner, this also works the opposite way: revisiting past cases will often lead you to realize details foreshadowing later game discoveries were always present there, you just lacked the knowledge to realize it. To me, this is the mark of great narrative in a game. Just remember though: even if you do know the name of some of the characters due to prior cases, you’ll still need to find the keywords again to fill in the blanks! Although this isn’t challenging in the slightest, so don’t worry. And if you’re particularly stuck in a case, the game has a very helpful hint menu to assist you!
These help features the game offers you are absolutely needed too, as the game can get very hard at times. I managed to finish the game without using any hints, thankfully, but it did take me about 5 hours. I will say this, though: every single second wracking my brain trying to understand what happened that led to the outcome I was seeing was absolutely worth it. Working out each sequence of events has been a highlight of my gaming year, and it evoked in me a feeling I haven’t had since Obra Dinn, which is that “aha!” moment when something clicks and you work out everything that happened. And every single time the game confirms that your theories are correct via the scrolls just makes you want to play the game even more, as you gain the hope that you are, in fact, not as dumb as you thought - that is, until the game crushes said hope again with the next hurdle in your detective skills. At least that’s how it went for me. I can not stress this enough: the gameplay was a blast.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2906409249
But what about the rest? Well, the story and narrative are also masterfully done. The cases all revolve around the titular golden idol, with one overarching mystery behind the twelve murders. Honestly, I know a few folks found the conclusion to everything kinda lackluster, but I was very happy with how the game tied everything together and concluded its narrative. The writing and the puzzles themselves are solid, requiring more deduction skills than guessing skills, which is always what a good detective game should aim for. The art style and the soundtrack are also great. The graphics are retro-styled, and while I know some folks are not fans of that, I am. It’s a very good looking game. The soundtrack is subtle at times, but it also perfectly complemented each case.
In terms of issues, I didn’t run into any glitches whatsoever, but I did find it a questionable design decision to have keywords vanish from the list at the bottom of the screen once you complete a scroll. I get that you can now drag the keywords from said completed scroll and thus there is no need for the bottom ones anymore, but I much preferred having them all in one place. Plus, I was fooled at the start thinking those keywords would no longer be used in other scrolls, as they vanished from the list I was pulling from, but that’s absolutely not the case, a fact which I learned fairly quickly.
Some other people did report finding the game boring and unintuitive, resulting in the player randomly assigning terms to the blanks until the game tells you you got the scroll right. I won’t lie that I did resort to that a couple of times, but I can’t help but feel that it’s because my logic skills were just not up to par. As the game gives you the “you have less than two names wrong” hint, once I got to that point I did test out multiple combinations in the name I knew was wrong. And also, playing with a controller is a pain. This was very much designed with the mouse in mind.
If you just want my TL;DR, this is it: get the game. It’s an incredible experience for those that truly want to feel like a detective, uncovering hints and the truth behind each scenario before moving on to the next and eventually uncovering the entire conspiracy behind all the events.
This review is also available on youtube! Check it out down below!
https://youtu.be/zquAdWovQlc