I'm delighted to see more deductive reasoning/"Obra Dinn-likes"--although in some ways it felt like a step back from Obra Dinn's ingenious logbook form of deduction. Instead, Golden Idol takes a "mad lib" approach: so as a necessity the game must rely on directly giving words to bank for solutions and explicitly providing information (for example, telling me directly a sword is clean or a latch is broken in tool tips) instead of allowing me to deduce.

Still, this allows for a wider variety of mysteries with more complicated stories playing out over many years. You'll come to recognize the same characters weaving in and out of the story and your general knowledge of the secrets of this world evolve alongside it (but not entirely paying off for me--I guessed the major twist early on). Golden Idol makes it easy to hop back to earlier scenarios to refresh your memory like you're Columbo coming back for "just one more thing"--although I couldn't always shake the feeling I was cheating when I did this.

I love games that compel me to pull out a notebook and start writing things down, which I was definitely doing here--although due to the heightened complexity of the type of mystery you're trying to solve, at times it felt more like rote information gathering, especially whenever the game would dump a pile of clues on my head. On that note, I do wish the game had let the player log a personal clue bank, like notes or diagrams that the player thought was valuable information.

The DLC saw a marked visual and musical upgrade, an improvement I'm excited to see Color Gray Games taking into their sequel, The Rise of the Golden Idol.