Thinky Direct 2025: City of Voices is an upcoming mystery game from Golden Idol collaborators

Dayten Rose, 16 June 2025

City of Voices is part of Thinky Direct 2025! If you missed it, Thinky Direct was our very first games showcase that gave a spotlight to a bunch of highly anticipated thinky games you'll love to solve. There were big announcements, exclusive trailers, brand new demos, and more! To view the showcase, you can watch it right here on the website, on YouTube, and on Twitch.

It’s the season of the idol-like, and no upcoming release has a stronger pedigree than City of Voices, a new mystery game by Rise of the Golden Idol collaborator Kini Games and artist Matt Frith—and one that comes highly recommended by the makers of the Golden Idol series itself. After knocking out the prologue-slash-demo (now available on Steam), I can see why. City of Voices is a rarity among titles in this emerging genre, struggling a bit on the presentation end but soaring in the more ephemeral areas where others struggle to capture a well-made mystery.

City of Voices follows a young girl (whose name I’ll leave to your deductions) whose dreams of becoming an explorer come true a bit earlier than expected. Although its setting and subject matter aren’t particularly conducive to murder, I also didn’t get the sense that this is a cozy mystery, either. Real danger may still be on the table as the story delves deeper into its ancient ruins. Thematically, Nancy Drew may be the closest comp: mostly dealing in chicanery, more heartwarming than heartpounding.

Easily its biggest departure from the idol-like formula is the lack of a word bank, which I was surprised to find didn’t impact the experience nearly as much as some other structural changes. Word banks in deduction games (and other recent riffs on puzzle genres, like last year’s Phoenix Springs) serve the same gatekeeping function as inventories in the old graphic adventure games.

City of Voices, by contrast, is far more utilitarian. Its solution screen presents simple questions with dropdown menus of possible answers. All answers are available right away, whether or not you’ve encountered them in the explore screen. There’s no fill-in-the-blank section that holistically describes the scene, and in fact, most answers are presented pictographically. Despite this de-emphasis on exploration, arranging the preset answers into a coherent sequence of events still presented a significant challenge. City of Voices plays like Return of the Obra Dinn in that way.

Where I did feel the lack of progress gating was in the “what is going on here” phase. With each scene presented in its entirety all at once—and with nothing as obvious as a murder to pin my investigation on—I spent the beginning of each scene clicking around to get a lay of the land, restraining my thinky instincts before finally checking the scene’s question panel and combing through once again. (I considered the alternative case of checking the question panel first, but being asked “Who drew the butt?” with no context, then opening a dropdown with scribbled images of a badger, didn’t offer much more clarity.)

Expectation definitely played a role in my difficulties here. You don’t technically need to explore an entire scene in order to solve it correctly, and the only thing animating me to interact with every clue was a kind of completionism. City of Voices is solution-focused, and it doesn’t much care how you arrive at that solution. That’s not always true of idol-likes, but it’s exactly where this game excels.

With any fill-in-the-blank game, there’s a danger of matching clues to blanks in a one-to-one pair. This taxes observation more than deduction, as any unsolved mystery is just an item you haven’t clicked on yet. But City of Voices weaves a much more devilish web. When it gets going, almost no clue solves anything on its own. Each one makes sense only in the context of the entire scene, requiring fluidity as new evidence is incorporated into a growing mental model of the events at play. I pinned each new piece of evidence in place in my mind, holding it there as I compared it against the rest of the scene, and then picked a new piece and did it all over again. It’s like trying to open a door with my arms full.

A message at the start tells the player that guesswork will never be required, but it certainly felt like guesswork sometimes. Because there are fewer sub-mysteries to solve in each scene, because I had to test my whole conjecture in one go, I always approached the solution stage with some shakiness. A small touch, but one I love, is the addition of an “I’m confident” button to lock in your answers. For Golden Idol fans, it’s impossible to “accidentally” gather information by filling the blanks with your best guesses and seeing how much is correct. You lock in your answer, a little animation plays—and when the green checkmark pops up, it feels like a million bucks.

I could talk about the pro forma ways in which City of Voices successfully captures the spirit of the idol-like. Its visuals are quirky, animated lightly and well. Its writing is sharp, a little silly, and often endearing. It’s not afraid of presenting conflict; nothing feels particularly safe or sacred. But all of that is secondary to the true purpose of a good deduction game, which is to make me feel a couple of times smarter than I actually am. So thanks for the ego boost, City of Voices. I look forward to playing more.