The Case of the Golden Idol is a complicated mystery game spanning twelve murders and forty years, requiring you to fill in all the gaps about what happened.
This game has very little interest in leading you around through your investigation, and I mean that in a positive light. You’re given an array of murders across a long span of time, and you’ll need to figure out everything about them. Sure, you’ve got a body and possibly a murder weapon lying in front of you, but who’s the corpse? Are you sure that’s the tool that they were killed with? You’ll have to dig into documents, things people said, and anything you can find around you to lead you to the snippets of information you’ll need to find out who died, who killed them, and why.
This is completed by filling in information in blanks, like in the screenshot above. As you find names, weapons, and possible motives, you can shuffle these around the blanks as you look for your answer. While this doesn’t sound terribly complex, it’s that your answers aren’t always available in the murder scene you’re currently looking at. You might have to advance through the murders to find further information that will clarify something that happened in the past. A great deal of this stuff won’t even make sense until you’ve seen the entire murder spree and can look at the big picture. I’m not surprised this impressed the creator of Obra Dinn, as it’s one of the extremely few games I’ve played since that has captured that feeling of real deduction.
The Case of the Golden Idol is the sort of mystery game that plays in your head even when the game’s off as you mull over every possibility. The kind of thing where you shoot out of bed in the night because you’ve finally connected a vital event or person. It’s endlessly compelling to tug at its mysteries and figure out its answers…if you can manage to think your way through them.
The Case of the Golden Idol is available now on GOG and Steam.
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