After finishing Return of the Obra Dinn I was looking for a deduction-based puzzle game in the same vein and stumbled across The Case of the Golden Idol by indie developer Color Gray Games. This is an absolute gem, with an engaging story revealed through polished investigation mechanics and a delightful art style reminiscent of 1990's adventure games.

The gameplay feels extremely innovative. Each of the twelve cases (eighteen if you include the DLC, which you should play) consists of "exploring" and "thinking" modes. The former plays like a point-and-click adventure game—the player explores a murder scene and identifies clues (some relevant, others not) which are captured as key words in a tray at the bottom of the screen. During the subsequent "thinking" mode, you actually solve the case, piecing together what occurred by filling blank spots in an incomplete description of the events, Mad-Lib style, with the available key words.

I found the difficulty of these puzzles to be just right and never used the available hints during my play-through. I was occasionally stumped at times, especially by the more challenging DLC cases, but usually found that by taking a step back and reexamining my assumptions I was able to tease out the solution. That said, I did have to brute force one or two tricky puzzles where the leap from clues to answer was just too great or a bit of questionable English got in the way of the developers' intention. Thankfully, the game validates if most (two or fewer) or all words in a section of narrative are correct, which felt more forgiving than Obra Dinn's "three identities" rule.

I also enjoyed the game's story, which follows an eccentric cast of characters vying for control of the titular golden idol, a supernatural relic that can perform magical feats. These characters are brought to life in an unique art style that looks like it was created in MS Paint; the presentation might be off-putting at first, but the detailed tableaus and amusing, looping animations quickly grew on me. The soundtrack by composer Kyle Misko is moody and atmospheric, but also surprisingly whimsical at times given the grisly murders that occur.

Overall, I really enjoyed my 12 hours or so with The Case of the Golden Idol. I've come to appreciate shorter, authored experiences that can be finished in just a few days and this certainly checks those boxes.

a really perfect execution of the investigation game as a genre. complex multifaceted crimes with zero procedural fluff to get in the way of Tactical Investigation Action.

A common problem with other mystery games is the linear narrative structure, where your protagonist needs to work through every clue in the precise order determined by the writers, regardless of how far ahead the actual player has been able to reason. It's a convention borrowed from how these stories are told in other genres, but I've never seen a mystery game take advantage of its medium as well as this one does. it's impossible to get ahead of the story here, because the format ensures that you're able to take advantage of every realization in real time.

i'd play a hundred more games in the same/similar format. really special game.

Gameplay and concept-wise, this game is absolutely fantastic. Obviously at its core one could compare it to Obra Dinn, what with you using deductive reasoning to establish who people in a scene are and how and why somebody died, but the bite-sized episodic presentation of Golden Idol feels like a completely different take on the genre. The variations in how to approach a situation and even what you need to find out are really quite impressive from level to level, with the latter levels in particular really standing out in terms of how varied the gameplay can get.

But there's a bit of an elephant in the room here... the game is fugly. The characters look weird as hell; I had warmed to the bizarre presentation a bit by the end, but I never grew to like it. And it's not just the art style that can be overwhelming, the flashing dots all over the screen to indicate places of interest give the game an extremely cluttered feel at times. But even this isn't necessarily a downside; Golden Idol uses this clutteredness and information overload to make each scenario appear extremely indimidating at first glance, which makes it that much more satisfying to piece together what the hell is going on. It's also packed full of twists and turns, and each one feels very good to finally figure out.

To list a few more concrete negatives, I would say the difficulty curve is all over the place. There was a massive difficulty wall for me at around the level 3/4 mark; a lot of this was just implied difficulty set up by the game's smoke and mirrors, but I can totally get why someone would bounce off the game at this point. And in the last few levels, it felt like the game got extremely easy again; possibly because I had more of a grasp on the overarcing story, possibly because I was more used to the tricks Golden Idol liked to use to hide its solutions, but these were some of the most interesting levels so it was a bit disappointing to breeze through them so easily.

I also think the game could have done with some kind of framing device, no matter how flimsy. You never get a feeling for who /you/ are supposed to be besides some omniscient outside observer, which can be a perfectly fine way to frame a puzzle game, but it does feel very abrupt to start up the game and immediately be thrown into the first scene without any indication as to what you're supposed to do or why.

But these are just kinda nitpicks. In the end, this really is an innovative and thoroughly satisfying game. Sure there are a few rough edges, even some of the dialogue is poorly translated at times, but on the whole I feel these kind of add a rough charm to the experience. Definitely worth your time, definitely recommended.

I generally liked it. As someone who likes mystery games more broadly and really liked Obra Dinn in particular, Golden Idol’s general premise seemed like it would be pretty appealing to me.

From what I’ve experienced, Golden Idol seems somewhere halfway between the sort of open-ended structure of Obra Dinn and a more traditional linear detective game. I think the structure generally worked in the game’s favor, letting it put much more emphasis on the broader narrative while still making the deduction feel satisfying rather than something where the game was holding my hand every step of the way. Though it did lead to some awkward points where it's unclear how much I’m supposed to just rely on info I’ve learned from previous cases as opposed to treating each case in isolation and only using the evidence presented directly. And while this never posed too much of an issue it did feel like cheating at some points since I could infer pretty key details about the case without properly deducing them. But just in terms of structure, the game was still good overall.

A bit weaker though were the individual cases. It seems each one tried to introduce its own little gimmick the the game instead of sticking with the same sort of murder mystery formula each time. And while this worked for a good number of cases, at other points it felt either bland or annoying. Golden Idol had quite a few moments where the correct answer felt tedious to get. Sometimes the structure of the sentence you’re meant to fill in is very unclear about what it's actually requiring, sometimes the leap from evidence to deduction feels too large as if there’s some sort of detail I completely missed, and on quite a few occasions the investigating was the only good part since the answer turned out to be pretty uninteresting as soon as you’ve actually looked at all the evidence.

But issues aside, The Case of the Golden Idol has enough going for it that I still think it's worth giving a shot. While I wouldn't call any of the individual mysteries great, they are improved through their meaningful contributions to a larger narrative (something that doesn’t happen often in mystery games) and even the worst cases tend to fail on account of blandness rather than the solution being outright stupid. And with the game only lasting 4-6 hours, you’re never lingering long enough for the weaker cases to outstay their welcome. So definitely worth playing if it seems like something up your alley.

This is the best detective game I've ever had a pleasure to play, hands down. It's also one of the very rare cases where I can't think of anything negative to say about the game (if I ignore the DLCs, that is).

The Case of the Golden Idol swiftly avoids every trap those games tend to fall into: there is absolutely no downtime forced on you because you don't embody a character that has to actually move around, the game doesn't take you for an idiot and actually lets you figure out everything by yourself, it usually provides way more than one way to figure out any particular fact, there is a persistent cast and a storyline which again the game doesn't take you for an idiot about, you never have to just guess your way through the game without good information (at least in the base game), and there is a lot of stuff you can pick up on that the game won't even quiz you on but that might help with your deductions later.

Almost every case in the base game is great, with maybe an exception of the penultimate case, which still had really fun parts about it. The DLCs are, sadly, significantly worse and there is a downward trend to their quality: the first DLC has three cases, two of which are pretty good but the third one is more or less just the summary of events; the second DLC's first two cases are okay but the third one is awful, doesn't even make much sense by the end and has maybe the only instance in the game where you're forced to guess the events that transpired.

I recommend the base game to everyone who likes to figure out things, which is probably everyone. I recommend the first DLC to anyone who ended up loving the base game, and if you really really loved it, you could get something out of the second DLC as well.

A comparison to Return of the Obra Dinn is seemingly unavoidable. The Case of the Golden Idol is about solving interconnected murder mysteries by investigating a series of crime scenes. Time is frozen while the player inspects the various characters: their positioning within the room, their belongings, their last few words, etc. Each chapter is concluded when the identities and circumstances have been deduced/induced. (Although it appears as if the investigation is purely deductive since there is only ever one likely solution, and the player is never expected to contemplate any of the less satisfying consequences of the probabilities of induction.)

The moment-to-moment mystery solving is excellent. It is backed up by a fittingly discreet soundtrack and the graphics are a nostalgic estimation of the golden era of Lucasarts adventure games. Still, compared to Obra Dinn, it leaves a faint mark. It’s more limited in scope, slighter in tone, simpler in terms of gameplay, and less aesthetically challenging. Not that any of this is really a flaw. The game is simply modest. The only real complaint I have concerns the episodes which focused primarily on decoding fixed sign systems. These were a little formulaic.

This game's constant revealing of stranger and even stranger esoteric strangeness with every case, the way hitting start you are slammed in the gob by an unexpectedly gnarly tableau, a sinister mise-en-scene with a man burning to death on fire or blasted apart by a canon while wry cultists in various states of masked and undmaskedness make slight comments to say How deserving they were to be killed by us in just that way, oh yes!

Ahhhh! That is all about what I love The Case of the Golden Idol for.

It is 13 deduction puzzles (including the DLC) for you and perhaps a friend on the couch wherein you will become acquainted with a decades long revenge tragedy that tore several families and several kingdoms apart as many people lost there lives in heinous and sometimes magical ways. As you move along the story and investigations grow more complex, which could be a bit fatiguing, especially by the end of the DLC. Though everything here is great, don't mishear me. The art is disgusting. It's visuals and music complete the necessary deranged curious mood to undergird the transmutating tone of a murder-filled horror story into one that equally unnerving as it is subtly hilarious.

This is a game made by some Latvians from Latvia, and maybe, buster, you should just pay them some money and attention.

Such a great puzzle. I honestly see no negatives in the entire game. Even though the gameplay is relatively simplistic, there is no sense of repetitiveness to it and every episode has a unique approach to it with different types of riddles. I had multiple moments during the game where I had a tricky puzzle and then I would go through the entire case and figure out the puzzle because of some small detail which at first you wouldn’t notice or would find insignificant, but then at the end realize that it fits the picture perfectly. This game is often compared to Return of the Obra Dinn since they are both of the same genre and since they both were able to nail the feeling of being a detective. What I do find TCotGI has done better than RotOB is its story. It has a really nice atmosphere of a classical mystery detective and even throws out some twists and turns along the way. Nevertheless, I do still think that these both are excellent and exceed in different places while still being of equal quality.
Rating: 9/10
Update: I replayed it and decided that it’s definitely worth a 10/10 or at least 9.75/10 for me personally. One of the most enjoyable games.
Rating 2.0: 9,75-10/10

Like many I was drawn to this game after playing Obra Dinn and seeking to satiate the desire for more of that type of gameplay. Sadly I think Case of the Golden Idol has stuggled to earn an identity of its own, as nearly every review (including this one) will compare it to its spiritual predecessor.

I don't think this is particularly fair, if anything it might be the start of a new genre that has yet to be recognized as such. When Doom hit the scene, every subsequent FPS was called a "Doom clone" for many years, even if retrospectively many of those games had little in common with Doom outside of simply being FPS titles.

Every stage in Golden Idol feels like a page from an elaborate pop-up book, awash with interesting characters that make repeated appearances.
You aren't merely a third-person observer, the player exerts godlike powers to read the characters minds and inspect their belongings. This allows for less guesswork and more genuine insight into their motivations.
The story unfolds chronologically (for the most part), unlike in Obra Dinn where the outcome was already known and you filled in the plot holes. It also distinguishes itself in that each chapter has some unique information you must discern beyond simply the identities and fates of each character, this was something I looked forward to each time I began a new one.

Ultimately I still found Obra Dinn to be the better of the two, if only marginally. I think some of this can be attributed to having played that title first when such investigative gameplay was still a novelty.
Nevertheless, I don't think Golden Idol deserves to be relegated to the shadow of its clear inspiration. Beyond the most basic gameplay mechanics they really don't have that much in common, and I can imagine somebody enjoying one while disliking the other.

The DLC is great too.