The Case of the Golden Idol is a 2022 adventure and puzzle video game developed by Color Gray Games and published by Playstack for Windows and Mac. The game depicts a narrative spanning 40 years in the 18th century, in which players collect clues to piece together concepts, characters, and evidence to...
The Case of the Golden Idol is a 2022 adventure and puzzle video game developed by Color Gray Games and published by Playstack for Windows and Mac. The game depicts a narrative spanning 40 years in the 18th century, in which players collect clues to piece together concepts, characters, and evidence to provide context to the story. The Case of the Golden Idol received praise for its use of deduction to present its narrative, and has been described as a spiritual successor to Lucas Pope's 2018 game Return of the Obra Dinn. The Case of the Golden Idol was cited as one of the best games of 2022 for its narrative and design. The player assumes a detective role in connecting together the details of the narrative from eleven cases, placing the player at or shortly after a static point in time where a central character in the narrative has met their death. Players resolve chapters through two modes of gameplay, with the overarching objective to correctly identify the details of the events in the chapter. In 'Exploring' mode, the game resembles a point and click adventure game where an environment is presented frozen at a point in time. Whilst the events on screen are frozen in time, players are freely able to navigate between rooms, open the contents of containers, and see what items and documents a character has on their person, as well as any words that they have said. In 'Thinking' mode, words of interest are used to piece together a narrative of what has occurred, through filling in blank slots against an incomplete description of events and characters. Parts of the 'Thinking' mode will differ depending on the chapter, in some cases requiring players to identify full names of characters, and in others specifying situational characteristics such as the titles of Brotherhood members, or the occupants of certain rooms. To assist the player, slots are completed in segments, with the player being notified when the words in that segment are either entirely correct, in which case the segment is locked in, or when the segment has more or less than two incorrect words allocated. The Case of the Golden Idol tells the story of the titular Golden Idol, a relic with supernatural powers, as it travels over time through the hands of the Cloudsley family to the criminal underworld, esoteric secret societies and the political and aristocratic class. It is later revealed that Sebastian and Wright are members of The Brotherhood, a secret society. The Cloudsley family conspires to return the Idol to their possession, and Willard Wright is murdered, returning the Idol to the elderly Edmund Cloudsley. Meanwhile, the other Brotherhood members successfully take out their opponents in parliament by murdering one and framing the other at a countryside salon. Years later, the Brotherhood, restyled as the "Order Party", have taken power in the country.