The Case of the Golden Idol

The Case of the Golden Idol is an innovative detective game following a mysterious, and possibly cursed, golden statue as it changes hands between a series of owners who meet with various gruesome fates. A fill-in-the-blanks interface creates deductive reasoning puzzles with hundreds of thousands of possible solutions, expanding on the format of Return of the Obra Dinn to unite plot-heavy storytelling with detail-oriented critical thinking.

The Case of the Golden Idol has two gameplay modes which you can toggle between: Exploring and Thinking. In Exploring mode, you navigate point-and-click vignettes, moving between different rooms and examining the contents of pockets and cabinets. However, you don’t inhabit the scenes diegetically—the scenes can’t be modified or influenced. Instead, you search the dialogue and documents for highlighted words, which get added to a word bank at the bottom of the screen.

In Thinking mode, each scene contains several Mad Libs-style fill-in-the-blanks puzzles, primarily in the form of sentences describing the plot of the vignette. You drag color-coded nouns, verbs, and names from the word bank into the blanks to complete the sentences and solve the puzzle. Variations on this formula include identifying the names of the characters in the scene, translating arcane symbols, and computing numerical values.

Compared to Return of the Obra Dinn, this format allows for a wider range of plots and scenarios. The vignettes are often classic Agatha Christie-style whodunit scenarios like “poisoning at the dinner party;” since the murderers typically want to conceal their tracks, this creates fruitful ground for misdirects and red herrings. In all cases, deductive reasoning is the key tool to tease out the overall story from the oblique details presented in the vignette.

The downside of this formula is that, when a puzzle features a line like “________ ________ ________ __________ the ___________ using the _________,” it can be difficult to figure out what it’s going for, and getting on the right track can sometimes feel like it requires a certain amount of mind-reading. The game does feature a hint system, but requires the player to solve a puzzle in order to use it. This may prove frustrating to players who were already struggling with the puzzles.

The story-heavy nature of The Case of the Golden Idol may not appeal to fans of “pure” puzzle games, who may find tracking the characters and plot threads to be tedious, but for narrative game fans, the close integration of puzzle with story is a rewarding alternative to the typical game story delivered through cutscenes or documents disconnected from the puzzles. The game’s pixel art style, featuring highly stylized characters in simple animated loops, has met with mixed responses, but it’s serviceable for the goal of making characters and props easy to identify and distinguish.

The Case of the Golden Idol received many accolades, including winning IGF’s Excellence in Design award, and has quickly become a favorite of deduction puzzle fans.

This description was written by Gwen C. Katz and edited by Oriane Tury.