The Rise of the Golden Idolhas been on my must-play list since it was announced last December. Its direct predecessor, 2022’sThe Case of the Golden Idol, is one of my favourite puzzle games of all time, which is high praise considering I’ve played so many of them.
More Puzzles, More Problems
Like Case before it, Rise of the Golden Idol relies on clue-gathering and a fill-in-the-blanks puzzle mechanic to present its mysteries. It offers up chapters consisting of three or four cases, each of which is a freeze-frame of an event or its aftermath, and you’ll often have to explore different locations to collect all the clues.
One early puzzle presents you with a press conference, but allows you to explore a morgue and an office building in the background. Another takes place at an art auction, and not only can you see what’s happening in the room where the lots are held, but you can flip between day and night to see what events unfolded in both areas throughout the day.
Points of interest are indicated by exclamation marks, and clicking them will zoom in on items as well as dump a number of words into your ‘words’ bucket. Many of these will be red herrings, so sorting out the most relevant ones as you go or returning to these points of interest multiple times can be helpful.
Once you’ve collected all the keywords, you’ll have to solve mini-puzzles (putting faces to names, names to fingerprints, and detailing the timelines of events) within each case in order to progress and confirm that you’ve understood what’s going on.
Investigating Conspiracies Is Better Than Ever
The Rise of the Golden Idol, like Case, revolves around the mysterious Golden Idol artefact. While you don’t have to play the first game to play Rise, the new game takes place in the ‘70s, around 200 years after Case, and explores how cults and money-hungry corporations are drawn to the Idol to further their own agendas.
Where Rise surpasses its predecessor is in its chapter puzzles. It was fairly easy to treat Case as a series of disparate puzzles and not really engage with the overarching narrative that tied all its cases together – while they all told a story about this artefact, the process of solving the puzzles could overshadow the story unfolding at its centre. You don’t have to piece together its threads in order to enjoy the game for what it is.
But Rise uses chapter puzzles to prompt players to think deeply about what the game is trying to communicate to them. After finishing each chapter, to progress to the next, you’ll have to figure out how each case connects to the other, the characters they have in common, and their motives for doing what they did.
Forcing players to make the overarching narrative explicit might be annoying to some, but it’s also an easy way to present more challenging puzzles to solve while ensuring that the series’ confusing, strange lore doesn’t go unacknowledged or misunderstood. At its core, Golden Idol is a series about conspiracy, and if we aren’t actively solving the conspiracy while solving puzzles, we’re not really understanding the game at all.
I’ve finished a few chapters already, and so far, the chapter puzzles have been frustrating, but it’s incredibly satisfying to put the jigsaw pieces together and slowly begin to see the big picture. While Case felt abstract and hard to parse, Rise’s chapter puzzles make it clear why you should care about these cases at all, and that’s incredibly valuable.
The Rise of the Golden Idol
WHERE TO PLAY
The Idol rises… 300 years laterThree centuries following the unspeakable fate of the Cloudsleys, the legend of the Golden Idol has all but faded. Now it is carried only in small whispers, uttered as an obscene myth.Some are determined for this to change.Welcome to the 70s - Blood and DiscoThe Rise of the Golden Idol follows a tenacious relic hunter on a quest to unearth the powerful artifact that - if the legend is true - can reshape the world.As the observer, you must investigate 20 strange cases of crime, death and depravity. Like before with The Case of the Golden Idol, you are free to investigate however you wish and build your own theory.You must make sense of a grand mystery that unravels across an age of hallucinogens, fax machines, parapsychology and TV guides.Enlightenment seekers, convicts, chat show hosts and corporate middle management will all have a role to play in the wider mysteries that unfold. Like always, many of these subjects will have their own motives. Some will be carrying more than agendas.
