The Case of the Golden Idol Review (Zeebrax the Astral Lifejacket)
Simple yet crispy fresh! Cleverness finds no end to variance in adventure gaming sub-genres! As a bodiless, timeless intelligence, you waft through a number of scenes -- loosely frozen, the animate principals woggle slightly back and forth in time -- and investigate murders and accidents revolving around the eponymous Golden Idol: a bit of lost technology from the long-since deteriorated (but still extant!) Lemurian civilization. The background is a sort of alternate Georgian period; Britain is Albion, France is Aquitan, Lanka is not quite Sri Lanka. Go through the pockets and packs of temporally challenged suspects, read their diaries, consider the state of their weapons, look closely at dead bodies as each segment weaves yet another thread in the morbidly funny epic of the Cloudsley family and its idol-centric fortunes! Setting, story, and writing are razor-sharp throughout, evidence of much time on paper ere execution. From the top of my dorky soul to its murky bottom, I respect -- nay, worship! -- such a satisfying fullness in any creative endeavor!
You complete each scene by switching from exploration to thinking mode -- filling in Mad Lib-style forms that explain all circumstances and name all key elements and personages. Elementary it seems, perhaps too straightfoward, but no! Real (logical) thinking is required to piece together the narrative, and the text around the blanks can itself be misleading! You must go through and actually gather the terms for thinking from the exploration as well; in that way it's like a more intellectual hidden object game, especially if you choose the option for key terms in exploration mode not to be highlighted, which I recommend! (Of course, you're a bodiless intelligence here, not the blandly attractive woman of early middle age that most true HOGs feature as protagonist -- yeah, I kind of like those.)
This fine game is only complete with the DLC, which tells the tale of a Lemurian priest's son, a Lankan royal family, and how soft-headed Albert of Albion came into such a dangeous possession to begin with.