A ghoulish scene: a shadowy figure has just shoved someone into a high-voltage circuit box. The victim is stuck at the moment of death, sparks flying as their body convulses; downstairs, everyone is frozen in surprise at the moment the lights went off. Scrutinising this scene, you must determine who everyone is, where they are, why they are there, and of course, who committed this murder. You examine faces and objects, go through everyone’s pockets to see what they have on them, read notes and signs and letters for clues. Eventually you piece it together, filling in a report with missing words that explains exactly who, what, when, where and why.
Rise of the Golden Idol is an alternative-reality 1970s detective game where each individual scene, once solved, tells you something about a bigger mystery. It’s a sequel to The Case of the Golden Idol, set 300 years after that game’s age-of-exploration mystery, but following the trail of that same cursed object. Some of these scenes are relatively innocuous, even funny, like the drive-in cinema where an unexpected fire sends the cosplaying customers scrambling for the exit. Others are gruesome: in the opening case, a strangling plays out on an infinite loop like an Instagram boomerang story.
Solving these cases is supremely satisfying, though you’d better hope you have a good memory for names and faces. Scenes might have 10 or more people in them, and I needed a notebook to keep track. There are increasingly obvious hints on offer when you get stuck, but as the game warns, using them robs you of the pleasure of using your deductive reasoning. Nonetheless, when I had figured out the main thrust of a case but couldn’t get someone’s surname straight, I was glad of the button that showed me which blanks were filled in incorrectly on my reports.
It’s the strangeness of Rise of the Golden Idol that makes it so memorable: the intentionally grotesque art style, the characters’ asymmetrical faces and crazy, shifting eyes, the backgrounds daubed as if with paint pens. The murders and robberies and other crimes here are bizarre, the tableaux unsettling in their eternal two-second movement loops. I found it hard to get a scene out of my head until I had solved it, leaving me poring over my phone screen for half an hour at a time, thinking, cross-referencing and noting things down. Where is that character’s glance leading me? Why is that rug disturbed? Where did that stain come from?
The larger story that arises from these details is very much worth all the effort. Between chapters, your fill-in-the-blank case reports turn into fill-in-the-blank summaries of everything you’ve learned from the last few cases, helping you to draw the connections that make the story crackle with intrigue. This isn’t a game that you can play with your mind on something else; it requires you to pay very close attention, to focus your thoughts, and see what your brain can do. I was pleasantly surprised by my own power of reasoning.
The crime scenes are so weird that you never know where this game is going to take you, but you’ll always have what you need to figure it out.
