Reviews from

in the past


actually a horror game with a math jumpscare but i survived

Wonderful detective game that fuses point-and-click with mad libs to deliver brain scrunching puzzles and maddening twists.

While it's not simply a murder mystery, Golden Idol draws a still scene for you to parse, whether it's a murder or a disappearance and so on. Instead of ruffling the scene for clues to add to a list, you earn words to use on a mad-libs type scroll to make sense of assailants, objects, or actions.

I dig the art even if it shows its seams at times, the only thing that felt especially jarring is the occasional comic style cutscenes between some chapters. Being pre-rendered it strips away the charm of the art and introduces laughably bad speech boxes that look amateurish at best.

Puzzle design is fun and the story itself interested to progress with, but some level had inconsistently long leaps of logic between the solving steps that it turns into guesswork with the scroll. Since it gives a special warning when you've got two or fewer mistakes, meaning you can keep swapping pieces while using confirmed pieces as a control group. I can't describe this as me spoiling my fun, since most of those instances were when I found the solution but was struggling with composition of the pieces.
I did like how it lets you do some minigame style puzzles to unlock hints, I only needed to use it once, but it's a nice idea of breaking the thinking tedium and jog your mind elsewhere. As a fun way to re-tread the events, you can also check previous chapters and solutions to eliminate some of the guesswork for scrolls, the game even prompts you to do so at the final chapter.

The first expansion; the spider of Lanka is a prequel to the events of the game. Animation is improved however the scenario script was too convoluted for my tastes. I spent more time switching pieces than I did exploring the scenes.

It does have apparent flaws, but it's a good detective puzzler with a nice story to follow.