After finally going back to Obra Dinn and feeling underwhelmed, I remembered I had bought this. It turns out that The Case of the Golden Idol is pretty much a better version of the same concept.
Much like Return of the Obra Dinn, you're determining what happened in a scene by examining details from one moment frozen in time. Unlike Obra Dinn, there isn't a bunch of horseshit wandering around to pad out the game's length. The scenes are viewed like a point-and-click adventure game, and you collect words by examining things in the scene in order to fill in a sheet that says what happened.
While these start very simply, like "_______ died from ________ in ________", eventually you're putting together entire scenarios, motivations, etc, as well as experiencing other unique usages of the format. However, in many cases the deduction screen has side activities, I believe meant to help you figure out what happened. In a couple of cases I found those to be far more difficult than the main segment, but they're not required to progress.
The art is rad and grotesque, and characters can easily be told apart. This is important, as the cases come together to form a complete story, and characters recur throughout them.
The game is pretty short, I think it was about 4 hours total for me, though this obviously depends on how long you get stumped. I never felt it was unfair or required guesswork. The Case of the Golden Idol retails for $18, which I would consider a bit much. I got it for $12, which I think is fair. But hey, that's just me. They call me The Frugal Gamer. Pay no attention to all of those unplayed Trails of Cold Steel games in my library.
Much like Return of the Obra Dinn, you're determining what happened in a scene by examining details from one moment frozen in time. Unlike Obra Dinn, there isn't a bunch of horseshit wandering around to pad out the game's length. The scenes are viewed like a point-and-click adventure game, and you collect words by examining things in the scene in order to fill in a sheet that says what happened.
While these start very simply, like "_______ died from ________ in ________", eventually you're putting together entire scenarios, motivations, etc, as well as experiencing other unique usages of the format. However, in many cases the deduction screen has side activities, I believe meant to help you figure out what happened. In a couple of cases I found those to be far more difficult than the main segment, but they're not required to progress.
The art is rad and grotesque, and characters can easily be told apart. This is important, as the cases come together to form a complete story, and characters recur throughout them.
The game is pretty short, I think it was about 4 hours total for me, though this obviously depends on how long you get stumped. I never felt it was unfair or required guesswork. The Case of the Golden Idol retails for $18, which I would consider a bit much. I got it for $12, which I think is fair. But hey, that's just me. They call me The Frugal Gamer. Pay no attention to all of those unplayed Trails of Cold Steel games in my library.