Mystery games have been on the rise over the last few years, but it’s still rare to have one treat you like a proper sleuth. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Games like The Seance of Blake Manor<\/em> and Emio \u2014 The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club<\/em> accomplish some neat tricks with the formula, but they still put guardrails on the information you glean and how you glean it, not to mention the conclusions you can draw from it. It’s fine! It’s just not all that detective<\/em>-y<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Case of the Golden Idol<\/em> is very much that detective-y, though. Your job is scouring the scene of a \u2014 usually rather grisly and unsettling \u2014 murder and the surrounding areas, looking for any shred of a clue. Not that you’ll know how important something you find is right away. The idea is to stockpile information and figure out its relevance based on what you observe with the rest of the scene and what information you can find out about the people involved. Then, for the climax, you piece together all your bits and bobs and (hopefully) arrive at the right conclusion about what happened.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n It starts off in a comparatively simple manner, with you just slotting words into sentences that describe a basic scenario. That tutorial scenario involves an explorer murdering his companion and covering it up, all to get his hands on a mysterious artifact, before the scene shifts to another time and place entirely. Evidence gathering and deduction quickly escalate, though, and few things are more satisfying than feeling the shape of a conclusion gradually unfold in your mind as you work out how your clues fit together.<\/p>\n You might think it’s basically a Hercule Poirot simulator, arguably more of one than the most recent Poirot game, and you’d kind of be right. The emphasis on deductive reasoning and careful observation is very much the kind of thing Agatha Christie made her famous sleuth so adept at. But even in the most creative interpretations of Agatha Christie’s works, did Poirot have to investigate a combusting man or supernatural objects and<\/em> piece together a solution that spanned centuries? No, no he didn’t.<\/p>\n But you do in Case of the Golden Idol<\/em>, and the actual stories behind these horrible histories end up being one of the game’s strongest points. It’s easy for tales of magic objects and mysterious cults to get lost in their own ridiculousness or for episodic mysteries to lose sight of the bigger picture. But Case of the Golden Idol<\/em> grounds them just enough in humanity that it rarely seems absurd. There’s a mysterious cult and attempts to take over the world, true. But mostly, it’s a tale of greed and lust for power taken to their extreme limits. Like with the evidence you find in each case, all the small details gradually build up over the story’s course and culminate in an excellent conclusion.<\/p>\n You can finish it in a couple of evenings, too, as the 12 cases take roughly seven hours to complete. And if you find at the end that you want more, its sequel, Rise of the Golden Idol<\/em>, is just as brilliantly executed.<\/p>\n \n The Case of the Golden Idol is a brilliant detective mystery
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