The Case of the Golden Idol is a beautiful gem of an indie game which is sure to satisfy lovers of puzzle games and aspiring detectives alike. I certainly enjoyed my time with it!
While following the style of the Return of the Obra Dinn, the Case of the Golden Idol nonetheless feels like a unique experience that ties together a story over many years through snapshot moments in time. It’s a masterclass in showing instead of telling, and the gameplay left me feeling like a true detective.
This game does not hand anything to you, and yet it also never feels impossible to solve. Maintaining that balance between difficulty and frustration is something some murder-mystery games struggle with. However, this one manages it with a deft hand, giving the player just enough freedom to investigate and form theories so that when all the threads come together, the satisfaction is incredible.
Gameplay
The Case of the Golden Idol describes itself as “a new kind of detective game that allows you to think and investigate freely.” This is a somewhat accurate description. I would not consider a completely new form of game, myself; rather, I think it falls into a newer category of games that has popped up within the last several years. Along with the Return of the Obra Dinn and Chants of Sennaar, the Case of the Golden Idol is what I have decided to call a minimally guided deduction game.
What does that actually mean? Well, in the Case of the Golden Idol, you are thrown into a frozen moment of time, either at the exact instant or soon after someone’s death. Within this snapshot, you are able to investigate the environment, gathering clues that appear as color-coded words at the bottom of the screen.
Once you have gathered some evidence, you then need to put it all together using the “Thinking” page. This page lays out what happened around the time of the death, but with a lot of the information missing. You have to use the words you gathered to fill-in those empty spaces.
If you correctly fill-in a section (which consists of multiple empty spaces), it becomes locked, letting you know that you got everything there correct. After you correctly lock-in all the information for a particular scene, the game summarizes what actually happened and you are able to move on to the next case in the game.
The game doesn’t force you to figure things out without any guidance at all, however. For example, the missing information that you have to fill in is color-coded just like the words you gather, so you know exactly which set of words can possibly go into any particular spot. Also, if you are only one or two off correctly filling out a section, the game will tell you that, giving a yellow incorrect message instead of a red one.
I think these are really important to have in a game like this. Investigative freedom is one thing, but it could easily become really frustrating if you had nothing at all to go off of. With these little assists, I was able to complete the whole game without using any hints.
I also played using the recommended game mode which means that anywhere you can click is highlighted and the words you can collect are underlined. However, this really only amounts to a quality of life difference. There are a lot of things you can interact with, and I think it would have been annoying for me to have to trial-and-error figuring out exactly what to click in order to gather the correct words.
And you do have to read and look through pretty much all the information you can, whether it’s a word that you can collect or not. Not all of the words you gather are actually useful for filling out the Thinking page, and you need the full context of the scene in order to properly put everything together.
In the end, the gameplay is pretty much just point-and-click. But the game does an excellent job of setting up interesting scenarios, giving you a lot of information, and assisting just enough so that the process of sorting through what you find is engaging without ever being boring or too much. The areas you can explore get more complex as you continue through the game as well, starting with a single room and ending with an overview map. As you get more into the swing of things, the game ramps up subtly in difficulty, making what you need to figure out more intricate.
Overall, the Case of the Golden Idol has relatively simple gameplay, but it does a lot with it, showing you can make something really enjoyable to play without a lot of bells and whistles.
Story
I don’t want to talk too much about the story for fear of getting into spoiler territory. This is the kind of game you should really experience for yourself, and the story is tied very closely to the investigations you do in each case. However, I can give a brief overview and some general comments.
The story follows the path of the Golden Idol, a relic found in the 18th century that passes through many hands over the course of the game. Spanning 40 years, the scenes you investigate are sequential in time, but each one involves the Idol in some way. In fact, many times, one scene will directly result from the last. For example, at one point you investigate a death and the next case involves an incident at the reading of the will for that dead character.
Much of the story is told through the environment. While you do get a summary of the specific event you were investigating after every case and there is a small cut-scene every so often to lead into the next case or next batch of cases, for the most part, it is up to you to follow the through-line between each snapshot in time. This means that you need to remember the names and faces of people you ran into previously. The game will not always directly tell you that it is the same person. Often, there are connections for you to notice beyond even the details needed for the specific case you are trying to solve.
It’s pretty cool, a way of telling a story that is almost in the background of what you are doing in the minute to minute gameplay. I really liked that moment whenever I realized that, hey, this guy is the same guy from that case or when I noticed the same person or name of a place popping up again and again. To solve some of the later mysteries, you really have to have been paying attention to these consistencies and through-lines. This is not a game with disconnected vignettes, but rather one telling a cohesive story where you only get a small piece of the picture at a time.
And in the end, it all comes together, just like each individual case. In a way, the overall story is just a reflection of the experience you have solving each smaller mystery. As someone who loves storytelling and the ways people play with storytelling, I loved it. The story itself has some really cool parts and also some more obvious twists or less interesting sections. But the way it’s told and how it ties into the overall experience really makes up for any such deficiencies, in my opinion.
DLC
The Case of the Golden Idol has two expansions: the Spider of Lanka and the Lemurian Vampire. Both of them play just like the base game, requiring you to gather information and properly input it on the Thinking page in order to progress. Each DLC contains three cases, meaning they are both pretty short, but these cases are almost immediately on the more complex side, often involving multiple scenes and locations. While both of the expansions are set prior to the story in the base game, they are definitely designed for you to play them only after you beat the original. You should also play them in order, as they build on each other.
The Spider of Lanka tells the story of a series of incidents in Lanka. While it is not immediately clear what this has to do with the Golden Idol, as the cases progress, some familiar names and faces start appearing. It all comes together in the end, making it clear exactly how this is connected to the base game and how the Golden Idol is relevant. I will avoid direct spoilers here, however.
The Lemurian Vampire picks up after the Spider of Lanka and ends right before the Case of the Golden Idol starts. In this DLC in particular, there is a lot of flipping back and forth in time. A case will give you scenes set at different moments across days or hours that all relate to the same incident. The first scene you see is always the incident itself, meaning you basically put together the story backwards as you explore the different areas available to you. It’s a pretty cool way to interact with the environments, and it adds more depth to the cases, which is nice since there are only three in total.
The Lemurian Vampire also does something slightly different from the base game and the Spider of Lanka in that it remembers some information across cases. By this, I mean that relevant people you identified in a previous case are saved on a different tab on the bottom of the screen, allowing you to access those names for the Thinking page without having to collect them again. While I did forget about tabbing back and forth a few times, overall I think this is probably an improvement. Especially since the DLC is short, it really helped streamline things to not have to repeatedly lock in information and helped the story and cases feel like a cohesive whole.
Overall, the DLCs are fun and I would recommend playing them if you are a fan of the base game, but they don’t really do anything new. They expand on the story and the Lemurian Vampire experiments with a few minor changes, but it’s generally more of the same. And that’s a good thing! After all, the base game was already really enjoyable and a great experience.
Final Thoughts
If you love mysteries or puzzles or anything in that vein, such as escape rooms, I highly recommend giving this game a try. The minimally guided deductive genre as a whole is developing some really cool and fun games, and this is a great example of one. It’s a game focused entirely on thinking, but no less exciting for it.
I’m really excited to play the sequel that is coming out this year. But overall, I can’t wait to see what developers in general will do to top the Case of the Golden Idol. It’s sure to be incredible.
You can find the Case of the Golden Idol on Switch and Steam.
