Golden Idol Investigations trades the extensive sagas of the base game for more episodic murder mysteries

Dayten Rose, 24 June 2025

Two of the four planned Rise of the Golden Idol DLCs are out now. Styled as “Golden Idol Investigations,” The Sins of New Wells and The Lemurian Phoenix trade the extensive sagas of the base game for more episodic murder mysteries, and the brutal difficulty of the original game’s additional content for less complicated, more innovative puzzles. These are worthy additions to any sleuth’s case library, and they affirm once again that no one is doing it quite like Color Gray.

Whereas the original Case of the Golden Idol DLCs functioned as prequels leading into the story of the main game, the newest expansions are much more interested in weaving independent mysteries with oblique connections to the story of the base game.

In The Sins of New Wells, you follow Roy Samson—a detective quietly taken off the central case in chapter one of Rise—on his new assignment. Taking place immediately after the events of the base game, it’s definitely the more tied of the two DLCs to that story, but it mostly stands up as its own noir story set against the backdrop of a gang war.

Samson’s inquiries make this four-scenario bonus chapter feel more like a traditional detective game than anything else in the series. Dialogue hints aren’t relegated to whatever gasps or private conversations the characters happen to be having at the key moment. Instead, the evidence takes the form of on-the-scene interviews as Samson conducts his investigation.

I’ll admit that this change of pace felt a little limiting at first, given that I’m used to the completely open-ended approach to deduction taken by other Golden Idol scenarios. But the player’s omniscience remains intact: I still discovered things that Samson didn’t, and conversely, he remained an engaging character in his own right, independent of my sleuthing. With how much these games tend to star ambitious gremlins failing to the top, it was refreshing to unravel the case alongside a competent professional.

Supernatural elements do ultimately appear, and without spoilers, this chapter ties up the major loose ends of the Golden Idol plot. That may feel cheap for a DLC, but rest assured that the finale is so jaw-dropping that… well, I’ll spare hyperbole and just report that my partner and I kept saying “this is so cool” over and over again to each other. New Wells is full of set pieces worthy of a main Golden Idol entry.

The Lemurian Phoenix is somewhat more grounded by comparison, but no less engaging. It follows a political struggle within the ranks of Lemuria’s religious royalty. Boasting some of the trickier riddles in the series so far, with more leaps of logic than the base game Rise typically requires, it nevertheless maintains a tight focus on smaller scenarios and shorter fill-in-the-blank sections. If you play these games co-op, it’s liable to produce some grade-A pinboard conversations, beefing up its already slightly lengthier five-scenario runtime.

The strength of The Lemurian Phoenix is the strength of this latest run of DLCs as a whole. I love the sweeping sagas of both base Golden Idol games, but that wider scope comes at the cost of production time. Longer waits between releases make it more likely that my ability to tackle more inventive cases will atrophy—which is precisely what happened with the release of The Case of the Golden Idol’s two DLCs, The Spider of Lanka and The Lemurian Vampire, which the Idol devs told Thinky overshot the roof of complexity under which a case remains fun to play. (For those who need a refresher, both featured scenarios were as large as the finales of either base game, a kind of knock-down-drag-out approach that tested the player’s endurance as much as their deductive power.)

The more episodic approach taken under the Golden Idol Investigations moniker allows each set of puzzles to revolve around a wider cast, each with more definite motivations. In my head, I compare it to Rian Johnson’s television show Poker Face versus his work on the Knives Out films, or the Sherlock Holmes short stories versus the novels.

To retain the added challenge fans might expect from post-game content without repeating the mistakes of the Case DLCs, The Sins of New Wells and The Lemurian Phoenix opt for difficulty through innovation. Both chapters tweak the typical flow of information found in Rise, producing a satisfying learn-as-you-go experience that stays complex without becoming complicated. It’s exhilarating to see Color Gray’s ability to breathe new life into this franchise. Even when some of their experiments don’t land—I found the interview segments of New Wells a little bit on the nose, and the subversion of objectivity in chapter three struck me as more cheeky than effective—I’m abuzz with the potential for future cases.

It’s already fairly incredible that the Golden Idol caseload has remained so consistently good throughout its lifespan. These latest chapters show that it isn’t just the framework that led to the series’s success, but the talent of the storytellers behind it. And they’re clearly not running out of ideas any time soon.