Last year I was enamored with The Case of the Golden Idol, a mystery detective game that threw all typical conventions of the genre out the window and presented such a unique approach in gameplay and storytelling that I regarded it very highly. Naturally, when developers Color Gray Games announced a follow-up I was immediately on board. While Rise of the Golden Idol refreshes its visual style and adds a new layer on top of the original, the freshness has come off slightly. For those returning for more Golden Idol, you’ll get exactly what you want, but don’t expect a lot of new innovations.
For those who missed out, in Rise of the Golden Idol you play as an omnipotent “detective.” In a sense it is similar to Return of the Obra Dinn, where you are simply presented a scene and tasked with finding out who the people involved are, what specifically happened and how they are all related. These vivid tableaus are still the highlight and involve some wild scenes where characters are being killed, set on fire, caught in fights or sometimes just simply cleaning up their garden. As you dig deeper into these scenes, you find specific words, names and verbs that you can enter in an overview. Every scene is completed once you figure out what happened to who. Optionally you can figure out who all the involved people are and their internal motivations for their actions. It becomes a detective game where all the clues are always right in front of you, but the game is mostly taking place inside your head as you put together the individual clues.
Rise sets itself apart from Case as it is a sequel that takes place between the 1960s and 1970s of its fictional universe. The throughline is still its mysterious Golden Idol, an object of power with a bloody history. You will trace how the object was re-discovered and what the people in charge of many cults, clans and corporations do to get their hands on its power. Most notable is its new structure. Unlike Case, where the story was told mostly chronologically through its scenes, Rise skips and jumps through the decades, making their larger connections feel more obtuse and hidden from the player. New characters and their involvement with the Golden Idol become harder to trace as in one scene you are in the late ‘70s, but the next one takes place a decade earlier. The game is divided into specific chapters that tell a larger part of the story, the scenes within those chapters can be wildly different from one another. Each chapter ends with a review where you tie the stories together with the clues you’ve gained at the end of each scenario.
This is where Rise lost me a little bit with its narrative. I think the brilliance of the original game was that you could clearly see how the power structures shifted around the finding and recovering of the Golden Idol. But with its time jumps backwards and forwards, Rise made it very hard for me to keep track of its overall story. Compounded with the fact that the gameplay hasn’t really changed between Case and Rise, and I had to really push myself to keep engaged with the game. The difficulty also wildly varies, with some scenarios being pretty straightforward, while others within the same chapter could be a real spike in finding the right words and clues to keep track of who’s who.
Finally, the Switch controls just didn’t quite feel right in docked mode. Moving the cursor to select and swap words was a bit slow, and using the D-pad became very tedious as sometimes it would skip over certain interactive options. The lists of words can become very long and can be hard to navigate, especially when you need to flip to the next page of words by moving the cursor all the way to the second tab and then moving it back up again to select the first word. With a game dedicated to placing words in the correct position, it did become a bit of hassle at times and turned into slight frustration.
Rise of the Golden Idol retains a lot of the great design and gameplay from Case of the Golden Idol. Its new graphical style is a welcome change and makes the world feel a lot more vibrant and lively. But it also falters underneath its own weight, with a far more complexly woven narrative that jumps time periods and had me struggling to keep up with its story and difficulty. The lack of a real gameplay innovation made me notice the repetitive nature of Rise of the Golden Idol. While I am sure that fans will still eat up what is being served here, I did have to push myself at times to stick with the game to its ending. There is plenty to enjoy here, but the brilliant pacing, focus and storytelling from Case of the Golden Idol looms large over its sequel. It’s a shame it doesn’t live up to that potential, while still reinforcing the great ideas that are the foundation of the gameplay. Let’s hope the Golden Idol shows up once more in the future to bring both styles together for a spectacular conclusion.
