Murder at the Birch Tree Theater, an upcoming detective title from composer Mike Pettry, is not quite an homage to the Golden Idol series. It can’t even really be called a love letter. It’s more of a shrine to the now-legendary Color Gray game, snipped apart and pasted back together, candlelit in the back corner of a dressing room closet.
Whether or not Birch Tree stands on its own two legs feels somewhat beside the point. I enjoyed my time with the demo, banking words and employing them to solve environmentally presented mysteries, because of course I did: it’s copying a tried and true formula. But seeing as the game invites comparison in just about every arena of gameplay, UI, writing, and overall vibe, I wound up thinking about Birch Tree as an emerging genre rather than a game. Searching each lightly animated 2D scene for winking clue indicators, which bring up text boxes with snippets of vague dialogue and whatever letters, weapons or pocket lint each character possesses, I couldn’t escape the pressing question: What makes a good Golden Idol-like?
To briskly set the stage, Murder at the Birch Tree Theater follows a series of deaths in the titular community theater, starting in the prologue with the murder of a respected actor as he reveals its board’s nefarious dealings. The following chapter takes us back to the building’s opening day, from which point we’ll get to follow the events that led a group of bushy-tailed theater enthusiasts to become crooks. (The demo only follows these first two chapters. It’ll take you less than half an hour to see it through yourself.)
Musical theater is cooked into the very crust of the plot, creating a thematic, almost procedural throughline between characters and events. There’s an understudy who yearns to be the lead, a starlet palming Valiums on opening night, and seasoned producers who have seen it all before. True to the developer’s history, it’s all underscored by music perfectly keyed to the era and circumstance of each level, which will make a certain kind of theater nerd very happy.
That’s about as much as I can say without getting into comparison. Like, all of the characters in Birch Tree are bipedal animals a la Zootopia. Names often reference the characters to which they refer, so that you don’t necessarily need to find the monogram on Jacob Humming’s shirt to figure out that he’s the hummingbird, for example. It serves as a kind of hint layer, a subtle narrative glue. But it’s difficult to interpret this flourish except as a nod to Golden Idol’s quirky art style and the interweaving lineages of its cast.
And I could go on like this. Birch Tree follows animals as opposed to aristocrats. It tells a more grounded story as opposed to a more supernatural one. It follows the life cycle of a location as opposed to an object. I’m unable to organize my word bank or move panels as opposed to the quality of life changes made in The Rise of the Golden Idol. I rarely said, “What an inspired choice!,” but I often said, “I see what you did there.”
I’m not bothered by this obvious borrowing of form. I am a bit bothered that Color Gray doesn’t appear anywhere (yet) in the game’s Steam page, on its website, or in any visible credits—not that every artwork needs to belabor its inspirations, but they use the same font for god’s sake—though perhaps the lift here is just so obvious that shouting it out would be overkill. Those who enjoy Birch Tree will do so because they enjoyed Golden Idol, after all, not necessarily the other way around.
No, what nags at me while I play Birch Tree is slightly more philosophical, having to do with the challenges of detective puzzlers as a whole rather than one case of copied homework. Detective games have never really had a genre to call home. They’ve variously occupied the spaces of point-and-click adventures, third- and first-person puzzle games, visual novels, and FMV. As its developers told Thinky last year, Golden Idol was itself inspired by Obra Dinn, Her Story and Outer Wilds—three completely different mechanical frameworks tied together by a shared approach to problem solving.
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I partly blame this placelessness on the fact that detective games—like most thinky titles—have a uniquely short shelf life, since their mysteries are only designed to be solved once. To combat this, certain games (like the Frogwares Sherlock Holmes series) excise narrative context from their puzzles completely, stringing together contrived challenges to advance dialogue. Repeatable, sure, but not intellectually rich. What’s always been needed is a genre template capable of pointing its puzzle elements in the same direction, namely toward the singular eureka moments that define detective games.
If Golden Idol is the game to finally crack that formula, then I have no complaints! Its core feature of “fill-in-the-blank murder tableaus” is ingenious but not setting-specific. Anything could fill those blanks. In Little Problems—another idol-like which shares the original’s publisher, and thus has a more definite connection to it— the scenes are cuter, and the mysteries are as mundane as a broken cup or fumbled class project. Birch Tree remixes its plot, characters, and set dressing, yet maintains just about everything else. Is that enough to be an idol-like rather than an Idol clone?
It’s difficult to tell from the outset of a genre which elements are vital to the experience and which are cruft. For the recent wave of Balatro-likes, playing cards are irrelevant as long as the numbers climb quickly. Sokobans absolutely require the pushing of blocks, but can sustain a great variety of character movement types. Golden Idol-likes are capable of telling many different stories, from the everyday to the globe-spanning, and for my money, they rely more on limited omniscience than on any specific visual layout. But of course, the surest way to capture what makes a game special is to copy it.
All in all, when it comes to Murder at the Birch Tree Theater specifically, I find that little effort was put into zeroing in on the more ephemeral aspects of what makes an idol-like click. Some good ideas are explored, and everything else is filled in wholesale by Golden Idol’s aesthetic sense—an understandable approach given that this is Pettry’s first game. Gratefully, it’s intent on telling a story all its own, meaning it will offer fresh mysteries to tide fans over until we get more of the genuine article.
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