I’ve always been meaning to sprinkle a few reviews of mystery games onto the blog, but haven’t got round to it until now.
The Rise of the Golden Idol is a sequel to The Case of the Golden Idol, which released in 2022. That was a game which I did enjoy, but found frustrating at times.

The basic gameplay remains the same between the two titles:
On selecting a case, you’re presented with a scene, paused at a particular moment (to be exact, it’s like time is looping for a fraction of a second). You can click on hotspots in the scene to examine them in detail – people, objects, dead bodies, and so on. By doing this you collect key words. Then you can switch to a solving mode which presents you with a fill-in-the-blanks sentence that you must complete correctly. It sounds simple and rather mundane, but it’s the way it all works together that makes the games special. The scenarios you’re given are complex, so what the game does is break this up for you. Most cases have a list of people, and you can to put names to faces – but this in itself is a puzzle. You can do things like examine what’s in people’s pockets – if they carry ID, that’s a free name for you. But sometimes you’ll have to figure things out from the context. Who is a letter referring to? Who owns the contents of that locker? Once you’ve pieced together who is who, this knowledge will help you to solve the overall puzzle.

The fill-the-blanks style might suggest something like Clue(do), eg “[Edmund] with the [candlestick] in the [library]”. But actually what Rise is doing is telling you a story, and guiding you to figure it out. The goal isn’t just “who did what to whom”, but thorough understanding of what caused the scene to happen – what are the dynamics between characters, and why might they have done what they did? Often, I found myself confused by a question, but then the fact that the question was asked would cause me to figure out something that I hadn’t put together before. Rise does this constantly – pushing you further than rote logic will allow and prompting you to think a little more creatively. You can hit eureka moments the same way you might when reading detective fiction. The developers have figured out how to surprise you and let you work it out at the same time. It’s this particular aspect that shines brighter in Rise than it did in Case. In the first game, though the cases were linked directly and followed the same group of characters throughout, the game only pushed you to connect them at the end. In Rise, the cases are linked, but they’re presented to you in Chapters containing three or four cases, and not always in order. After you finish a Chapter you’re required to fill in the blanks once again (puzzles within puzzles (within puzzles)), and these “tests” often recontextualize a lot of what you’ve just seen.

Whereas Case was mostly focused on murders, Rise branches out and plays with the format. Can you figure out what happened in a scene with only a single person? What about after the lights go out and you can’t identify people by appearance? Can you decode a very unusual secret message? The scenarios range from the simple to the ambitious. Not many cases here are murder mysteries, but one of the ones that is asks you to figure out the killer of a man lying dead in an apartment block – and gives you access to the whole block. Not only will you have to figure out the killer but much else that’s going on in the apartments besides.

One thing I love in book-based mystery fiction is when I read something absurd and wonder how the author can possibly explain that away or connect it to the plot. In Rise of the Golden Idol I would often be presented with a scenario and wonder how on Earth I was going to solve something that seemed so overwhelming, and the slow process of piecing things together was very satisfying. At the start of a new chapter, though, the game likes to throw a curveball and I was left wondering how something so weird could end up relating to the story about the Golden Idol. These moments were the ones I enjoyed the most, and the chapter which was entirely these curveballs was my favourite one. I could hardly ever guess where the story was going to jump to next.

For me this was a real fulfillment of the potential I’d seen in The Case of the Golden Idol. That one was linear, and followed a single plotline; Rise jumps around in time and is less clear about its protagonist, but weaves all these plotlines together at the end (well, apart from one, which I assume is a hook for a possible sequel). Though the cases often rely on context from previous ones, they mostly tell a complete and compelling mini-story. These side-plots, unrelated to the main plot, created some of the most memorable moments for me. Rise is much more interested in the world of its story than Case, which often felt very thin, as though the only people that existed were its main characters. Rise shows the ripples which spread out from the Golden Idol’s effect on that world, and makes it seem much more real.

Since the game focuses so much on the world, I should talk about it a bit. In Case of… and its DLCs, it was apparent that the world the Golden Idol exists in is not quite our world. In the first game, the Golden Idol was shown early on to have magical abilities, and the rules governing them factor into cases in both games. The countries of the world differ, and technology is slightly different (ornithopters, anyone?). I really enjoyed the alternate-70’s setting of this game, which brought things like hippies and drive-in cinemas into the story and let the writers get a bit more creative.
The first game was known for its grotesque characters and unusual art style, and though this has been updated a bit, the game is still populated by a gallery of distinctive caricatures. Apparently this is offputting for some people, but personally I’m glad that someone is out there making games in an art style that looks nothing like the “appealing” standards most games aspire to.

As you can tell from all this – I loved the game. To me this is a mystery game fulfilling its potential by using its mechanics in a beautifully polished and structured way. It’s worth mentioning how personal my enjoyment was, though. The game expects you to have your wits about you – to focus on it and to keep previous cases in your head as you play. I felt like the game was always pushing on the boundaries of what I was able to work out and follow along with. To be honest, at times near the end it pushed a bit too hard for me and left me confused for a while before I managed to work out what it expected me to know. But for the most part, it was a pleasure to be tested like this. That may not be the case for everyone who tries it. The game does have a hint system, which I really should have tried out, but I didn’t use it in my playthrough.