How The Case of the Golden Idol developers made one of the decade’s best detective games, twice

Dayten Rose, 16 December 2024

Following the 2018 release of Lucas Pope’s Return of the Obra Dinn, it seemed improbable that lightning would strike the detective genre twice. Then, The Case of the Golden Idol came out of the blue and electrified fans with a similar blend of striking visuals and pure deductive gameplay.

Now, with the release of The Rise of the Golden Idol earlier this year, it’s clear that Color Gray Games isn’t waiting on lightning to strike its series of quirky, puzzly mysteries: they’ve got it trapped in a bottle. They did it by honing in on puzzle design, ditching unnecessary limitations, and never shying away from experimentation.

Andrejs and Ernests Klavins, the brothers behind Color Gray, cite Obra Dinn (along with Her Story and Outer Wilds) as their main inspirations for making The Case of the Golden Idol, specifically because of the void those games revealed in the landscape of detective games: “Games geared towards you making the deductions,” Andrejs explained to Thinky Games, “not you roleplaying someone who’s making the deductions.”

The road to filling that void was defined by small steps forward and a deep bench of playtesters, an approach that paid off when The Case of the Golden Idol immediately joined its inspirations among the greats of the genre. “It was kind of unexpected,” says Ernest. But that success came with a sense of duty to continue. “There’s this saying that everybody can write his first book. The second book is the trick.”

Color Gray released two DLCs with the goal of stress testing The Case of the Golden Idol’s foundations but quickly found a “roof of complexity” past which puzzles were neither fun nor functional. So they began looking for ways to scale upward, maintaining the identity of the series while building a foundation that could match their lofty narrative ambitions.

This balancing act is apparent from the very first screen of The Rise of the Golden Idol, which ditches its precursor’s pixel art for a digital painting style that allows details to remain legible even as the game moves from close-ups to panoramas. But the actual aesthetic (“ugly but distinct,” says Ernests) is mostly untouched, barring the fact that Case’s carriages and sailing ships have been replaced with automobiles and ornithopters.

The change of scenery from 18th-century English pomp to 1970s retro was another intentional choice made to assure players that the sequel would be a fresh experience unmoored to the events of the previous game.

That’s not to say there isn’t plenty for fans of the original’s bizarre worldbuilding to grab onto in Rise—the Lemurian museum sequence in particular floored me. It simply refuses to dip back into the well of established characters and plotlines, choosing instead to chase detective gaming’s most elusive quality: surprise.

On the development end, this kind of constant reinvention comes at a high cost. Each scenario takes one to two months to reach Color Gray’s desired level of quality. Even after growing the team—recruiting from mystery properties they loved, including Signal & Echo: Iris Is Missing, Aurelius Whitlock’s Murder Museum, and Escape This Podcast—they found that not everything in The Case of the Golden Idol could be scaled up to Rise’s larger scope. The series was bound by certain practical limitations by virtue of its tentative development. 

On most projects, Andrejs recalls, “You’re developing your perfect amazing game, and you test it only when you’ve finished it. Which is scary in case you’ve made something that’s not so good.” So to prove their concept, Color Gray began by prototyping a single scenario. When that was well-received, they made another, then another, and then eventually the rest of the game.

Designing puzzle-by-puzzle and chapter-by-chapter did ultimately distinguish Golden Idol from the likes of Obra Dinn, where the player is tasked with solving one big mystery over its entire playtime. Plus, without the need to continuously pilot a focal character from scene to scene, the puzzle design is unconstrained by any specific perspective. Players are free to rifle through pockets, peer into locked safes, or hop through time.

At the same time, this approach created rigid patterns that limited design in unnecessary ways. For example, the original game’s “thinking mode” always appeared as a single screen of three or more panels. That left the team constantly looking for ways to fill panels, even when the puzzle at hand didn’t necessarily demand it. Along with certain narrative elements, like keying every scene to a dead body, these decisions became difficult to pivot off of as the chapters dragged on.

Taking all of this into consideration, Color Gray decided to keep the game’s overarching structure while cutting constraints. Rise does away with thinking mode, opting instead for more versatile popout windows that can be added as necessary. Scenes focus on thievery, intrigue, or harmless accidents, drawing the occasional murder in even sharper relief. Both of these twere technically possible in the first game, but the sequel offered a blank slate on which to start streamlining.

Only when scaling and streamlining failed to lend themselves to Rise’s more ambitious narrative were all-new mechanics added. Some of these were simple quality-of-life improvements, like automatically sorting the word bank into names, nouns, and verbs.

Other additions, like the chapter-spanning mysteries that frame each set of scenarios, ratchet up the complexity by making each case its own clue in the greater mystery. Each vignette in the Trials chapter is seemingly disconnected from the rest of the plot, save for the presence of several identical bracelets. Figuring out what those bracelets entail isn’t necessary for most of the individual scenarios, but vital for understanding the story as a whole. In this way, the framing puzzle gave Color Gray more wiggle room in the kinds of stories they could tell.

No game is ever a sure thing. Even when Andrejs and Ernests were sure they had made something special with The Case of the Golden Idol, releasing it into the world was a leap of faith. But now, with more flexibility and a safety net of detective game fans waiting in droves for each new release, that leap of faith has become a whole acrobatics routine: precise, sometimes daring, and always graceful.