A torrent of free game demos have been released as part of June’s Steam Next Fest event, meaning we get an early look at some of our most anticipated puzzle game releases. The demo at the very top of my list to play was The Rise of the Golden Idol, the follow-up to the award-winning (and a Thinky Games favourite) puzzle adventure game, The Case of the Golden Idol and I’m happy to report that this sequel has everything we love about its predecessor but more. More grisly murders, more gripping mysteries, and more incredibly satisfying puzzle-solving.
This write-up has some minor spoilers, but I’ve left out anything that isn’t in the game’s trailer and screenshots, so you can read on without wanting to eviscerate me with an ancient artefact.
The bloody history of the titular idol continues, with murder and bloodshed following the relic from the 18th century into the 1970s. The demo includes the game’s first handful of puzzle vignettes, which include a tutorial level and three scenarios. You’re again cast as an invisible detective, an omnipresent force looking over various grizzly scenes, plucking out words in the environment to complete fill-in-the-blank statements and trying to deduce what happened.
The first major difference in this follow-up is the art style, which has gotten a glow-up (if you can call it that). Scenes are still presented as frozen vignettes, but there’s now more movement which seems like it wouldn't add much, but really punches up the shock factor of certain scenes. Characters' faces will now twist and bulge in a way that will make you squirm, and shocking acts of violence feel more like they're unfolding before your eyes instead of being frozen in time. More attention has also been given to visual details, giving the demo an overall more unsettling edge than the first game.
The next couple of changes are in the game’s UI, which makes the game's puzzle-solving much more streamlined. The fill-in-the-blank statements now appear as moveable pop-up windows like on a PC screen. These windowed puzzles feel like an overlay on top of the scene, letting you observe the clues in the scenario and fill out the statements at the same time. There’s also a toggle that lets you minimise them all when your screen gets a little cluttered. I'm a big fan of this, as it can make cross-referencing details a lot easier than having to decipher the cryptic observations that I hastily scribbled down in my notebook.
Another new element is that keywords are now automatically added to your phrasebook when you find them instead of clicking on them individually - which is a godsend. You’ll still be collecting character names, verbs, locations, items and the like, but there are now ‘what if’ phrases too. These appear as guessable actions from the scene in front of you: Slipped on? Fell from? Collided with? These assumption-style phrases are great as they task you with even more detective work instead of giving you absolute truths.
But the biggest - and best - change in the demo is the addition of a single page of fill-in-the-blank paragraphs that you can complete in between scenarios. This uber puzzle essentially acts as the final boss of the demo and is not only the hardest puzzle of the game but cleverly summarises the story up to that point. In the first game, I found myself a little confused at certain story moments, usually because I had missed an important detail or subtle visual clue. This overarching puzzle prevents that from happening, making sure you’re aware of all the subtle details that are prone to be overlooked, which is likely to happen when your story is a tangled web of death and deception.
The Rise of the Golden Idol demo is a devious and delicious teaser of what’s to come. The TDLR is: it’s the first game, but better. Developers Color Gray Games have yet to slap a release date on it, but we do know that it’ll be out sometime in 2024, and we here at Thinky Games cannot wait.
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