Harking back to my now long distant youth, The Case of the Golden Idol is the type of game I might have played (and thoroughly enjoyed) 30 or so years ago. It’s an aging style of game that rarely gets made anymore, in both look and feel – but that’s no bad thing of course.
Whether you’ll enjoy the puzzling on offer here rests entirely on your patience, attention to detail and how annoyed you might get at dragging your mouse cursor back and forth using a controller.
Detective Mode
Firmly sliding into the “point-and-click” genre, The Case of the Golden Idol casts you in the role of detective, solving multiple murders that just occurred, using only the details and clues you can discover in the scene on display. The game itself spans across several decades, focusing on the titular ‘Golden Idol’ – an artifact that men would assuredly kill for it seems, that bestows upon it’s owner great power.
The Case of the Golden Idol ships with 4 chapters, each containing increasingly complex mysteries with an overarching narrative – and for players on Xbox, it’s worth noting that some additional content in the form of purchasable expansions are available beyond the base game that’s available on Xbox Game Pass. Each of these murder scenes is a moment in time on a loop, captured perfectly in this strangely charming pixel-art style.
Full disclosure – we couldn’t get our hands on native Xbox code in time for this one, so I’ve been playing on my PC with an Xbox pad, in order to emulate the experience for console players. I don’t think we need to worry about graphical performance for this particular title, but there’s one thing I am concerned about – and that’s how bloody laborious the game is to play with a pad.
The developers have added some slow-down buttons to manually adjust the speed/sensitivity of the in-game cursor while you’re moving it to enable you to be accurate, but frankly, The Case of the Golden Idol is just not as nice to play with a controller.
Now, as the game is coming to Xbox Game Pass, it’s possible the cloud version supports touch, which would be nice. But for many, the sheer thrill – or lack thereof – of dragging a cursor over and over the screen, clicking objects to discover clues, just to then drag those different clues into different boxes is going to be a bit of a showstopper.
The Case of the Golden Idol offers some helpful assists, via highlighting selectable objects with an animated flare on screen (yellow when “undiscovered”, and red once you’ve looked at fully) if you so choose, or a useful hint system. If you do choose to click that tempting ‘hint’ button, the game doesn’t just hand the answer to you on a plate, which is nice.
You can choose to turn the helpful object highlighting assist off – if you’re an absolute masochist and want to spend your time clicking every conceivable pixel in view.
Murder most foul
Through piecing together clues in these various murder scenes, we seek to identify not just who is responsible for another grizzly death, but how they went about ensuring someone’s untimely demise. It’s assuredly a brainy puzzler, so action-based thrill seekers need not apply.
Going through all the clues in the environments is called the “Exploring” phase of the game – you can sweep your cursor over everything of interest, with notes to read, names to take note of and items of interest aplenty. Once we feel we’ve got enough to start putting together the general ‘whodunit’ question, we switch over to the “thinking” mode.
Here, all our clues are presented as key words – names, items, actions and objects we’ve located in the environment, as well as various belongings contained in the different characters pockets, all come together in neatly colour coded blocks to help us piece together what happened.
The solutions are presented as text with blank spaces for you to insert the clues at your leisure. Once you’ve successfully and correctly filled out a section, the game confirms it’s correct and you can move on. However, beyond just solving who stabbed, clubbed or poisoned who, there are bonus objectives, like filling in the correct names of all the suspects and witnesses in a scene, for example.
I did feel somewhat clever as I figured stuff out, but felt way smarter switching to my trusty mouse after around two hours of trying to use a pad and becoming increasingly irritated. I did find the game far more enjoyable to play as a result.
Case Closed
The Case of the Golden Idol is not a game for everyone, but I suspect many who miss the classic adventure and point-and-click games of yesteryear will find an enjoyable and satisfyingly tricky detective based puzzle game to tackle here.
The plot thickens as a family yearning for power ‘battle’ over the Idol, and there’s a neat twist to the proceedings that I won’t spoil here. But I fear that many will struggle with the sheer patience required to play on controller, and while it all works just as well it can, it’s a case that many players may not want to solve in the end. And that’s a shame. Here’s hoping touch support on Cloud can step in!
The Case of the Golden Idol
Played on
PC
PROS
- Delightfully complex cases to solve
- Nostalgia-inducing pixel art of days gone by
- Great twist on the 'object finding' genre
CONS
- Painful to play with controller
- Can become sheer brute force guesswork at points.
