The Case Of The Golden Idol is gorgeous, gross, and one of the best detective games in years
Color Gray Games' The Case Of The Golden Idol tasks players with understanding a series of increasingly complex murders
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Sometimes, this column exists to explore a wider trend in gaming; sometimes it’s simply to allow me to exorcise some irritating nugget of the hobby that’s driving me nuts. On occasion, it’s entirely about making a bunch of fairly stupid jokes about video games where you try to murder Santa Claus. And sometimes, the purpose of this column is extremely simple: I’ve just played something that was exactly my shit, and I’ve got to tell y’all about it right this very second.
This is one of those latter kinds of columns.
The game in question: The Case Of The Golden Idol, the first title from Latvian studio Color Gray Games, a family affair headed up by brothers Andrejs and Ernests Klavins. (Who also make up the entirety of the game’s programming team.) Golden Idol has been floating around in demo form for a while now, and was recently featured on Steam’s Next Fest. But it’s now gearing up for a full release, bringing its inspired spin on detective gaming to full fruition.
The elevator pitch is pretty simple: What if Lucas Pope’s Curse Of The Obra Dinn took place as a series of standalone puzzles, rather than a wider exploration of a massive tragedy? (It doesn’t hurt said comparison that Color Gray wisely solicited a pull quote from Pope for the demo; it’s featured prominently on the game’s Steam page.) Like Obra Dinn, the player is presented with a snapshot of a murder, a static moment of a mysterious death, and asked to recreate, from context clues, brief snippets of dialogue, and their own deductive skills, what happened to lead up to the mortal moment. Unlike Pope’s game, though—which required players to fill in only identity, cause of death, and killer for each of its hapless seafarers—Case Of The Golden Idol asks players to go far more in-depth, sacrificing its inspiration’s breadth for case-by-case depth. You lose that sense of unraveling a truly massive mystery—and trade Obra Dinn’s perfect aesthetics for some that are merely very good—but Golden Idol has its own merits to make up for the loss.
Indeed, the result is one of the best versions of detective gaming I’ve played since, well … Return Of The Obra Dinn, and one that takes the “detective” part of that package seriously: You’re unlikely to be able to fill out the journal prompts you’re presented with in each of the game’s 12 cases until you’ve not just observed the scene—clicking around multiple locations, eyeballing the pleasantly grotesque art, putting names to faces—but actually understood whichever grisly chain of events has led to a newly minted corpse suddenly appearing in everybody’s midst. Increasing in complexity as the game goes on, the mysteries are almost all satisfying—while also being shot through with small details, strange ironies, and even the occasional outright punchline that helps to sketch out a larger story of greed, corruption, and alleged “virtue.”
In a press release for the game, the Klavins brothers talked about wanting to deepen the meaning of a “detective” game, pushing past simple button prompts or rote interrogations. The Case Of The Golden Idol is a game about understanding puzzles, not just solving them. Understanding the mechanisms of magic. (Indeed, it’s the rare mystery story where the introduction of the supernatural sharpens the deductive work, rather than rendering it meaningless.) Understanding lies and misdirection. Understanding the evils people do, the justifications they impose on others, and the pettiness that so often lurks underneath. And understanding, simply, the mechanics of murder, that beloved past-time of so many amateur armchair sleuths. More than almost any other detective game I could name, it makes as its primary object capturing that feeling of “Aha!” that sets in when you pause, one page before the big reveal of a mystery novel, and try to beat the detectives at their own game.
And, again, if all this sounds even mildly intriguing, my word doesn’t have to stand as gospel: Check out the demo, and see if the game’s ugly-beautiful art, its sinister undertones, and its whip-smart sense of puzzle-solving appeals. If you’ve read this far, I’m fairly confident you’ll be at least a little glad you did.