Video games allow us to truly feel like someone else for a while in a way no other medium can. I truly felt like a master swordsman when playing Rise of the Ronin earlier this year. I could have sworn I was actually on vacation when I was playing Dungeons of Hinterberg a week ago. Yet, when the video game is turned off, the fantasy dies. When it’s time to go to bed or to start getting ready for work, there is no more illusion of being on vacation or of being a badass. You are just another normal person doing normal things.
There might be one type of genre in all of video games where that illusion can carry through long after you shut off your console, and that would be with detective games. A good game in this genre can make you feel like you could actually be a detective if you really wanted to be. Of course, that’s probably not true, but it sure feels that way when you crack a tricky case with no one holding your hand.
Unfortunately, most games with detective elements are only very thin veneers of a detective experience. In many of these games, the cases are essentially solved for you, and the evidence is just a storytelling mechanic. Luckily, more and more indie games are bucking this trend and just giving you the evidence and then getting out of your way. The Case of the Golden Idol, which was released on PC in 2022 and was released on consoles about a month ago, is one of the latest games to do this. It also brings a few other interesting twists to the table that help it stand alone as something truly unique, and it is a game that anyone with any sort of detective fantasy should give a go.
Mad Libs But Actually Fun
One of the most interesting things that The Case of the Golden Idol does is put all of this detective work within a point and click setting. You are usually shown 2-3 screens worth of events where you can easily find and select all of the evidence available. You then use all of this information to figure out what happened with each particular case. I ended up really enjoying this setup because it makes the pacing incredibly fast. There is no slow build-up or preamble to any of the cases. You can quickly see the death that occurred (the scene is usually set immediately after the murder or very soon after), and then start scouring through evidence to try and figure out what actually happened.
There isn’t much in the way of dialogue, so you also don’t do any slow and often useless interrogations. Each character has one line of dialogue at the most, so the majority of your evidence comes from old letters, notes, and other context clues from the environment.
Your end goal is to essentially fill in a mad libs type statement with different names, adjectives, nouns, etc, to describe how the murder happened and who did it. The game smartly also gives you optional objectives that help greatly with piecing everything together. For example, each case has all of the characters’ portraits and blank spaces for their names as a separate challenge, which allows you to make sure you have the correct name for each character. This is obviously vital to solving each case.
When you fill in all of the blanks for any given case or for any optional objective, the game will tell you if you are right or wrong and even tell you if you are only off by two words/names or less. If you really need it, the game also gives you a limited number of times to see exactly what spaces are not filled in correctly. And finally, there is a hint system for if you are really stuck as well. The Case of the Golden Idol does everything it can to make sure you don’t run to the internet for a guide while still being challenging.
That challenge is one of the strongest suits of this game. I felt like the difficulty balancing was just about perfect. It took some serious deducing to figure out everything that happened in almost all of the cases but there were only a few times where I felt a little frustrated, or like a certain part of a case was unfair. There are a lot of very clever bits of evidence in each case, and sometimes the smallest details, like the color of a characters eyes or the size of a bed, can make all the difference. I felt pretty damn smart after each case that I solved. Most importantly, I felt like I was a real freaking detective!
I do wish that all of the evidence was as clever and organic as some of those examples I listed above, though. Look, I get it. This is a video game, and it’s not going to be easy for every piece of evidence to be completely realistic. But there is a lot of the evidence in the game that just felt kind of ridiculous in ways that took me out of that detective immersion at times. Some of the letters or notes that certain characters have in their possession make almost no sense for them to have held onto for weeks and months. One case has a big poster in a house that describes the side effects of different kinds of poisons. It’s an important piece of evidence but felt ludicrous as a decoration in a house. Little things like that pop up all the time, and it’s disappointing because there are plenty of bits of evidence that feel far more natural and plausible. I wish a touch more effort was put into this, but these were mostly small blips in my experience.
The slightly bigger blip ends up being the console port. The Case of the Golden Idol was clearly designed for play with a mouse, and the transition to a controller is just awkward and finicky in too many spots. There were lots of times where I thought I had a certain box selected, but a word I selected went into a different box or just got dragged to a different spot on the selection screen. There is also a glitch where your cursor can disappear, and I would have to mash buttons until I somehow fixed it and made it reappear.
There is Some Weird Shit Going On
Despite those frustrations, the core gameplay constantly kept me eager to play more. But as good as the gameplay is, the overall story may have been what kept me even more hooked on this game. The Case of the Golden Idol centers around, you guessed it, a Golden Idol. I won’t get into any details, but each case is connected, and you will see recurring characters throughout your time playing it.
Because the game has next to no dialogue, I didn’t really expect an interesting story, and boy, was I wrong. The back half of the game gets very weird in some fascinating ways. I was absolutely engaged and really wanted to see how things would end. That is rare for me when I don’t care about any of the characters at all, but it happened here. One plot moment in particular caused me to let out a real gasp because it shocked me so much. That’s not something I do often. Once again, I could say more, but I am afraid to even hint and ruin a great moment. I’ll just say that this games’ plot is VERY carefully constructed in ways that absolutely delighted me.
I was also similarly surprised by how much I enjoyed the games’ hand drawn art style. When I originally looked at pictures, I just wasn’t a fan of how strange each character looked. Each character seems to have at least one facial feature that almost looks like a caricature, and I just wasn’t into it. The more I played, it just sort of fit the vibe of the game in ways that I really liked. The music does a similarly nice job of fitting the mood as well.
Aerith: Take my Haaaand. Me: No, I Don’t Like Hand Holding
If I played The Case of the Golden Idol on the PC, I think my score would be closer to a 9.0. Despite a few small instances where I felt annoyed, this is a really fantastic detective game that does not hold your hand, which is exactly what I was hoping for. It also surprisingly tells one of the more compelling video game stories I’ve seen despite being told in a very nontraditional way. This is a unique and special game. It’s just a shame that the console port does this wonderful experience so many disservices.
Despite that, this is easily something anyone with any interest in detective games should still experience. And if you can play it on PC, even better.
Score: 8.5/10
Big Nerd Gaming 
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