The Rise of the Golden Idol review: 2024’s best mystery game

In 2022’s The Case of the Golden Idol, I’m sleuthing my way through a series of murders committed by cunning killers. In its next chapter, The Rise of the Golden Idol, I’m dealing with morons.

Color Gray Games’ puzzling sequel retains all the same hooks that made its predecessor a breakout success. It’s a brainy deduction game where players have to piece together the details of chaotic crime scenes by finding key words and slotting them into a Mad Libs-style explanation. The difference isn’t just visual though; The Rise of the Golden Idol twists that core idea into a 1970s comedy of errors about people toying around with power they can’t possibly understand. It all makes for a hysterical sequel that one-ups its already impressive predecessor, even if it’s still beholden to the same foundational flaws.

The idol returns

The Rise of the Golden Idol wastes no time in getting its groove back. Right from the jump, I’m dropped into a simple murder scene as one unnamed character strangles another. I click around the screen to find clues, documents, objects, and more, which then become words I can work with. From there, I need to figure out exactly what happened, identify everyone in the scene, and put the words I have into an “events” sheet that ultimately explains what happened. That formula was a satisfying evolution of Return of the Obra Dinn’s excellent deduction hook, and it still feels just as great to crack a case here.

That formula does still have its shortcomings, though, which persist here. The core problem I had with The Case of the Golden Idol in 2022 was that some of its more obtuse puzzles could be too easily brute forced. When the going gets tough, the event sheets can often be deduced simply by reading into the grammar of the Mad Lib. Rather than figuring out what happened in a scene, you can reverse engineer an answer by figuring out the only verb that could possibly work in a space. It’s a handy shortcut, but one that makes it too easy for players to misunderstand what’s happening or how they’re supposed to read clues. That persists here, with some puzzles even being particularly confusing because they rely on garbled grammar that doesn’t quite make sense.

Color Gray Games did seem to recognize that shortcoming, though, and has worked to lessen it here. Puzzles are no longer just about figuring out names or plopping words into an events sheet. Most cases find inventive new ways to get players to piece clues together that aren’t just built around words. In one standout chapter, I’m dropped in an aviary full of rampaging birds. One of my tasks is to figure out what exactly aggravated each bird by dragging pictures into a grid. Another has me figuring out a subliminal message hidden in a dance by using a book of body language clues. Puzzles like that take the Golden Idol formula to new heights rather than just repeating its greatest hits.

To complement that, The Rise of the Golden Idol sports a brand-new visual style, which trades in its predecessor’s oldschool pixel art for a more illustrative look. These mostly static scenes (they have just a touch of animation to them) have way more personality as a result and can better convey movement within a scene. That’s necessary for cases like one that has players trying to figure out a stray object’s rampaging trajectory through a suburban scene, making for a more visual puzzle game.

What I love more than any of that, though, is the tone and story this time around. I won’t get into specifics as I wouldn’t dare rob you of any euphoric “aha” moment, but The Rise of the Golden Idol is downright hysterical compared to its predecessor. The story moves from the 18th century to the 1970s, continuing the titular Golden Idol’s path through changing hands. This time, though, I’m not just tracking the murders tied to the device; I’m exploring the incompetence surrounding them.

The tale, told through 20 interweaving cases across five chapters and change, introduces me to bumbling scientists and new-age hippie cults that cross paths with the device. Everyone wants to harness its power for their own purpose, but there’s one problem: Nobody can figure out how the heck to use it. That kicks off a series of unpredictable mishaps that are a genuine delight to uncover. The fun comes from seeing a chaotic scene, trying to figure out what happened, and learning that the answer is way dumber than anything you could have imagined.

More than it is a detective game, The Rise of the Golden Idol excels as a slapstick comedy about human hubris and all the ways it can backfire spectacularly.

The Rise of the Golden Idol was tested on PC with a code provided by the publisher.