Game Check: The Case of the Golden Idol – A Detective’s Paradise – News

Do you get annoyed when characters in films, series or books act awkwardly or stupidly? In crime novels, do you usually know who the killer is even before the resolution? Can you smell plot twists from miles away already? Are you convinced that you can see connections and see the big picture? Then you should use your skills on occasion with the help of The Case of the Golden Idol check it – at the risk of having to correct your self-assessment afterwards.

In the exploration view, you can see the clues you have collected so far at the bottom of the screen and above that the moment of the murder.

Murder is your hobby?

At the beginning you will be thrown straight into your first fall. You are presented with a murder moment where one man apparently pushes another off a cliff. Your task is first to find and write down all the clues of this scene. This is done by clicking on hotspots (either with or without display help). Within the hotspots you can find more clues, such as the items in the backpacks of the two men. The documents found deserve special attention. You should read these carefully and add the highlighted words to your notes with a mouse click.

Have you collected all the clues from scenes that will later spread across multiple screens? Then it’s time to withdraw into your personal thought cave and reconstruct the course of events with the collected clues and thus finally solve the murder case. To do this, you fill in several gaps in the text by dragging and dropping the right keywords to the right place. As soon as all the gaps in a section are filled, you will be shown whether you are right or wrong with your conclusions. If you only made one or two mistakes, this will also be shown to you so that you at least know whether you are on the right track.

The documents found are not only important in terms of content. You must also record all the words underlined in red in your notebook in order to solve the case.

You have to earn deduction help

As soon as you have solved the first murder correctly, i.e. have filled in the gaps in the text with the correct keywords, you will be taken to the chapter view. From there you can start the next case or jump back to all cases that have already been solved. This is not entirely unimportant, because as you will discover in the course of your detective work, the murders are connected. How exactly, you have to find out for yourself.

However, the game won’t let you down if you ever get stuck. The Case of the Golden Idol has a clever built-in help system. However, you must earn the help. In order to increase the inhibition threshold for uncovering a clue, you have to complete a small diligent task in which you assign pictures to their appropriate description. While this isn’t really a challenge, it gives you a few more seconds to think about whether you REALLY need a clue. Because most of the time it’s enough to end the game, let everything sink in, and return to the case later.

The story opens up not only through your thinking in the individual cases, but also in comic-like cutscenes.

Combine: Exciting story with a successful ending

I don’t want to reveal too much about the story, because the best way to figure it out is to puzzle it out yourself. But you’ll quickly discover that the murders take place over a longer period of time in the 18th century and that the mysterious golden statue from the title plays a big part. You will also be confronted with a secret society, conspiracies, planned and unplanned murders, jealousy, revenge and other topics.

You work on twelve cases in total, which become more and more complex and require your full attention at the latest in the last sections. The final mystery lets you look back explicitly into the other chapters, so that it is easier for you to see the connections. I liked the resolution at the end, and the epilogue, in which you can have your theories confirmed again, was a great idea from the developers.

In the later cases, the gaps that you have to fill in become more and more numerous and complex, but they always remain logically deducible.

Conclusion

For me, The Case of the Golden Idol was a real grab bag. I was expecting a pixel point-and-click adventure, but I got a very clever detective game that easily matches the game that is extremely popular among connoisseurs Return of the Obra Dinn can keep up. The presentation on screenshots took some getting used to at first, but in motion, with background music and as the game progressed, it seemed extremely fitting and atmospheric. The font used, which strongly reminds me of the Amiga Workbench, also aroused pleasant retro feelings in me.

The mechanics of the game hit me right away, I’ve seldom followed clues and read documents so keenly and attentively as in this game. However, you should bring good English skills with you, towards the end I had to look up one or the other term so that I didn’t miss any details. Every solved murder brought me happiness, especially the most complex case at the end of the game. It’s just a pity that it was relatively short with five hours of playing time. I would play another game like this again in a heartbeat.

• Detective game for Linux, MacOS, PC
• single player
• For amateur and professional detectives
• Price: 17.99 euros on Steam
• In one sentence: Exciting mystery puzzles with motivating game mechanics