Golden Idol Investigations: The Age of Restraint

Golden Idol Investigations: The Age of Restraint is a detective game DLC that expands The Rise of the Golden Idol. The puzzles are presented as fill-in-the-blanks descriptions of illustrated cases, with precise solutions to deduce out of thousands of combinations. This third DLC offers insights into the ancient times of Lemuria, a fictional country once thriving with bizarre technology — and the place of origin of the titular Golden Idol.

As in the base game, The Age of Restraint contains several point-and-click vignettes which display confounding situations. You navigate the vignettes in search of clues and meaning, collecting relevant names and words in the process. Once you feel comfortable enough about explaining the events, you use the collected words to complete fill-in-the-blanks solution sheets. A gradual hint system is also included with each scenario.

This DLC is set in ancient Lemuria, an isolated and technologically advanced country. The four cases follow the dramatic events surrounding a law enforcement squad over a short time span. These so-called sentinels rely heavily on the veridola, a piece of tech meant to distinguish truth from lies. Language, however, is more ambiguous than the veridolas assume, and it’s your job to explain the inconsistencies and unbend the truths that the devices failed to detect.

As with the previous DLCs, each case’s difficulty has been met with varying reactions. Making sense of The Age of Restraint’s scenes requires segmenting a good number of clues into semi-autonomous parts, after which you’ll be able to understand the events in full. One of these sub-puzzles was designed as a detective reinterpretation of block-based visual programming.

This description was written by Oriane Tury.