Most of the mystery games I play, place an emphasis on the story, and use game mechanics to allow the player to advance in the story. Most of them are of course adventure games where you closely follow the development of a tale of mystery, and the story is allowing the player to interact with the mystery by presenting them these puzzles in the form of questions, to see if you managed to solve them. Often, these games also offer an 'inventory' system in the form of a clue system, where you accumulate clues which you can use to for example answer the aforementioned puzzles ('showing evidence'). A game like Gyakuten Saiban/Ace Attorney for example in fact mainly revolves around the exact same puzzle being fed to the player constantly, be it a highly context-senstive one (a contradiction between the evidence you gathered and a statement made by a witness), while other games like Detective Pikachu Returns might just present varying questions depending on the specific story part, ranging from "who is the culprit and what is the evidence that points to them" to "do we have some clues that could tell us how we could get past that guard?" or something like that. Still, most of the adventure games I play basically ask you context-specific questions that pertain to that specific part/scene of the story.
2018's Return of the Obra Dinn was a huge surprise as a mystery game, as it focused much more on one core deduction-focused game mechanic, and it basically only asked you the same question again and again, without much change in the actual underlying context of the question. Investigating the body-filled ship the Obra Dinn which mysteriously returned to the harbor, your task is to 1) identify each dead body and 2) identify the cause of death (and culprit if applicable). This task remains the same from start to finish, and you could theoretically just fill in the crew list, connecting each name with a portrait and their cause of death right from the beginning. Of course, the game wasn't that easy, as identifying each corpse depended on reliving their final moments via a magical watch, and it was necessary to have a very keen eye for contextual details to deduce from each death scene what name belonged to each face: a man being called by his name is of course a very easy clue, but most of them weren't that easy, and had to be deduced from seeing in them in multiple scenes and connecting various clues together. That said, the core tasks remained the same, and in my review, I described Return of the Obra Dinn as in essence being "a gigantic sudoku puzzle: you know each face and each name, and now you have to determine what names and faces can or can not belong together by crossing off all the possibilities. If for example you know this person is either the carpenter or the carpenter's assistant, but you also heard somewhere that the assistant dies before the carpenter, than you can identify both once you know in what order the two nameless faces died." Because each person can only have one name, face and cause of death, and names and faces of course are not shared among multiple people, it really felt to me like sudoku, determining the characteristics for each "sudoku puzzle" and knowing how faces/names/ranks/etc. had a finite number of uses. Strangely enough, I've had multiple surprised reactions when I described Obra Dinn's gameplay as sudoku, even though in my mind it seemed not only so obvious, but I couldn't even imagine it was an original thought in any way. Earlier this year, I played Unheard, which had a similar feel (but audio-based) and it was quite fun!
When The Case of the Golden Idol released in 2022, I heard it had gameplay similar to Return of the Obra Dinn, and I also played the demo when it was released, which I enjoyed a lot. But for one reason or another, I didn't pick up the full game right away, but now we're more than a year later, and I finally played the game. * When you start up the game, you are immediately presented with a ghastly scene: one man pushes the other off a cliff. The problem? You don't know what the heck is going on. Who is the murderer? Who is the victim? Why is he murdering the other? Where are they? As you click around, you gather key terms (names, verbs, locations, etc.), and you slowly start to piece together the story behind this scene: set in the 18th century, we are looking at the two men who obtained the titular golden idol during an expedition, and apparently one is killing the other in order to keep the idol for himself. But who is who? You find letters with names in their rucksacks, so you know the two men must be Albert Cloudsley and Oberon Geller, but who is the pusher, and who is the pushed?
It's here we are treated to the gameplay similar to Return of the Obra Dinn: to get anywhere in this game, you must first use the names you have gathered, and assign them to the faces you see on the screen. At first, this is fairly easy, like seeing one character addressing the other by name, or for example you can guess by their uniforms, but later scenes are much trickier. Because Golden Idol's gameplay focuses mostly on determining who and what everything is on the scene, the murders you'll be solving
are fairly straightforward: the focus is not on the how, but on figuring out the whole underlying context. While a lot of the scenes might seem rather baffling at first, that's often simply because you're dropped in a scene that is unfolding right now, and usually after collecting the first few key words, you'll quickly grasp the broad outline of the case, after which you can concentrate on figuring out who everyone exactly is and the order of events leading up to the murder. Unlike Return of the Obra Dinn however, The Case of the Golden Idol will also ask you other questions about the scene to answer, again using the key terms you have accumulated from the scene. You might be asked to determine whom certain letters you found on the scene belong to, or you find a floor diagram and must also determine who stays in what room. Once you figure out these secondary clues, you are usually tasked with one final mission: to determine exactly what happened. This is done by completing a short summary of the scene, which has a lot of blanks. You fill this summary in using all the key terms you found. You might for example see Character A killing Character B with something in their hand in a unknown location. So first you have to use the clues to determine A is in fact Colonel Mustard, a name you found in a letter in the luggage in one of the rooms and you remember one character calling A by his title, and then based on the books in the background of the location you determine the room is in fact the library and not the kitchen, and finally, you can fill in the blanks in the summary by saying [Colonel Mustard] walked into the [library] and used the [candlestick] to kill [Miss Scarlet].
While not as difficult as Return of the Obra Dinn, The Case of the Golden Idol is certainly a detective game that will challenge your mind, as while the first few scenes you investigate are fairly small and straightforward, later scenes might involve several screens with a lot more going on. The story is surprisingly epic, spanning several decades and each "level" is a specific scene (usually moments after a mysterious violent death) revolving around the titular golden idol. You follow the golden idol's journey as men crave its powers, but because each scene is presented without any introduction, it's up to the player to guess how this scene might connect to the previous one, even if it might be a few decades since the last scene and it's set at a completely different location with perhaps only one face or name you recognize from a previous scene. That is one part I really enjoyed The Case of the Golden idol over Return of the Obra Dinn, as the latter was a great deduction game, but the story you uncovered behind the crew's mysterious deaths was not that one of deductive mystery. The Case of the Golden Idol however does present one and realizing how each scene is connected to the next is part of the mystery the player also needs to unravel in order to beat the game. At first though, the scenes might feel very disconnected and that might feel a bit disappointing, as you move from one confused state to another, but it does come together quite nicely once you're past a certain point, when more of the plot is revealed.
I quite enjoyed the overall story too, though I do think some of the secondary puzzles you are required to solve in each level had too much of a "logic puzzle" sense to them. One of the later stages for example had you figure out something out to a degree that wasn't really relevant to the case at hand (do you really need to know those exact numbers?) and those parts I didn't enjoy. I liked Obra Dinn a lot because it used the same basic puzzle of face + name (+ cause), but some of the secondary puzzles in Golden Idol feel very contrived as puzzles (sometimes, it almost feels like people are for example only calling other people by codenames or nicknames just so the player can be presented with a puzzle).
The demo I played one year ago of The Case of the Golden Idol is basically the same as the full product, so I can't say I was really surprised by the game now I have played it, but it is a very fun mystery game that really puts an emphasis on deductive thinking. If you liked Return of the Obra Dinn, you're certainly going to like this, and because of the shorter playtime and the slightly easier difficulty, I'd say The Case of the Golden Idol might even be the better introduction to this style of deductive reasoning games. I haven't gotten around to the DLC yet, though I have heard it's more
challenging than the base game, so I'll probably eventually get around
to playing those two too sooner or later! Preferably before the recently announced sequel comes!
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