The Case of the Golden Idol

You’ve got murder! You’ve got the occult! You’ve got party politics!

The Case of the Golden Idol. Image credit Color Gray Games/Playstack

Okay, first things first – this is the CASE of the Golden Idol – if I refer to it as the Curse of the Golden Idol I am terribly sorry, I have just had Covid (hence the slight delay in this issue of Quick Play) and my brain has really struggled with the words. Plus, Curse would be a totally appropriate word in the title in my opinion – nothing good happens to anyone who touches that thing.

Secondly – I am going to try and write this review without giving anything away, spoilers-wise. This game is way better if you go in with no preconceptions and no answers to any of your bubbling questions. The game took me around four and a half hours but I didn’t play the DLC, just the base game.

So, The Curse Case of the Golden Idol. It’s a mystery game where the player takes the role of a detective attempting to figure out what has happened in each scene presented. Many words have already been written comparing it to the Return of the Obra Dinn, and now it’s my turn to add to them. There’s no way to disagree: as much as I do like to try and make my own comparisons, this game truly is in the vein of Return of the Obra Dinn. You look at a static scene and have to answer a batch of questions. After you’ve answered a small section you get confirmation, and that helps you with the rest of the scene.

I really love how Color Gray Games have taken what they liked from Return of the Obra Dinn and turned it into their own game. It doesn’t feel like mimicry or empty copying – The Case of the Golden Idol is to Return of the Obra Dinn what Hollow Knight is to Castlevania. Well, maybe they’re a bit more similar than that but you know what I mean. It just feels like another game in a genre which was revolutionised by Return of the Obra Dinn.

The chapter select screen is gorgeous too. Image credit: Color Gray Games/Playstack

I also think it’s worth saying that while the comparison is inevitable, The Curse Case of the Golden Idol does not suffer for it. We all know the saying “comparison is the thief of joy” but it’s such a useful shorthand to be able to say ‘if you enjoyed X you might like Y’ or even ‘if you disliked this thing about A, you might want to steer clear of B’. I think people get very hung up on certain things when it comes to comparison and inspiration and I am sure there are folks out there who think The Case of the Golden Idol is somehow too similar to Return of the Obra Dinn, and I really have to wonder – do they just play one game per genre and then stop, dismissing hundreds of excellent experiences because they are too much like something that came before? I think people would benefit from considering that when a game takes inspiration from a game you love, it might actually build and improve on the experience, or change it into something new. One of my first favourite games was Thief, but I didn’t dismiss Dishonoured on-sight, and thank god, because that’s also now one of my favourite games because it took something I loved and changed and added to it. Is it better? That’s a false dichotomy – it’s different, and I love them both. So let yourself enjoy things, you might find a new favourite. (I am sure this is the paragraph the editor would cut if I had one – how is this relevant to the game, they’d say in exasperation – but I’d need a lot more subscribers before I could hire an editor! So it stays.)

The gameplay is divided into two parts – exploring and thinking. In the ‘exploring’ screen, you survey a scene (of a death) and gather information – you click on items, various words, and people (helpfully illuminated – you can turn off the shiny prompt but the game strongly recommends you keep it on, lest it become an exercise in pixel hunting) and when you do, they float down into your thought cabinet. When you’ve collected everything, you flick over into ‘thinking’ mode, which is kind of a weird mad-libs-esque puzzle (I think – being Welsh, I’ve never encountered a mad-lib in the wild, but they are pretty common as a cultural reference point) and fill in the blanks. You might need to label the pictures of the characters with the correct names, or label icons on a ritual, but all of the levels have a large block of text where you need to essentially establish the gist of the scene before you.

The “thinking” part of the game - mad-libs! Image credit: Color Gray Games/Playstack

So listen. I absolutely adore puzzle games and mysteries like this. I like escape rooms and those little grid-based logic puzzles in old puzzle magazines. But reader, here’s a confession: I am fucking garbage at them. And so it was with The Curse of the Golden Idol. I would really like to be able to say, definitively, that all the information you need to solve every puzzle is there, as long as you can use a little deductive reasoning, but I can’t – I used a little bit of trial and error, and then I had to look up some hints for the last two levels. They both required you to pull together threads of information from all across the game to answer some pretty overarching questions, which was unfortunately just beyond me. I had to focus so hard on the puzzles as individual pieces that I never managed to zoom out and get a sense of the story as a whole.

Which is a shame, and a failing on my part as a puzzle solver rather than the game, because when I “solved” the epilogue with the help of an online guide and looked at the story, it was really cool! I was able to appreciate each individual scene at least. I think it’s very easy for games like this to skimp on the story and preference the puzzles but in The Case of the Golden Idol it doesn’t feel like one thing suffers in the aid of the other. You’ve got murder! You’ve got the occult! You’ve got party politics! There is a very limited hint system but I never actually found it to be very useful – it was usually the case that I could solve the puzzles or I was so stumped that the hints provided were insufficient. But I’m glad they tried!

The characters aren’t attractive but they are distinctive. Image credit: Color Gray Games/Playstack

Aesthetically, the game has an incredible sense of itself. It’s really stylized, entirely 2D drawings with small touches of movement added, but it’s extremely effective. As well as the mystery-detective mechanics of Return of the Obra Dinn, it strongly invokes the old-school point-and-click adventure games of the past. The people especially are all horribly gruesome with bulging eyes, hooked noses, and other extremely distinctive features that make it possible to remember them from chapter to chapter.

The score is quite minimal but really effective. It’s ominous, foreboding, and highly atmospheric. I really liked it. I will frequently listen to Spotify when I’m gaming – music if there’s a lot of dialogue or other words to follow, or podcasts if it’s a game like Minecraft or something, but I was so engrossed, I listened to the game music all the way through.

Overall, I highly recommend The Curse Case of the Golden Idol to anyone who enjoys puzzle games, but I will caveat that you absolutely do have to use your brain to solve the puzzles. You’re not just looking to find the right item – you will have to infer, deduce, and generally figure things out. And don’t look anything else up before you dive in.

• Game: The Case of the Golden Idol

• Developer: Color Gray Games

• Publisher: Playstack

• Platforms: PC, Switch