As a lifelong lover of period dramas and detective games, I was delighted to start up The Case of the Golden Idol and find myself in media res, watching a murder unfold on-screen. There are no explanations, no friendly tutorial pop-ups, and no hand-holding – my favorite (and arguably the best) way to start a mystery. The game’s chapters are made up of brilliant tableaus that tell the tale of the Cloudsley dynasty – one of whom is in the first opening scenario – and how they leave their mark upon a fictional version of 18th-century England. The aesthetic is pixel-perfect nostalgic – a lively hand-illustrated style that invokes the caricature-like angles of Maniac Mansion and Day of the Tentacle, and the satirical prints of editorial cartoonists like William Hogarth, who chronicled London’s current events in the 1700s.
Golden Idol plays on basic intuition and common sense, and while it takes me a few moments to warm up to the game, I soon develop genuine admiration for its simplicity. As I examine this first scenario – a perfectly frozen moment in time with potent little touches of animation – a few exploratory clicks are enough to get going. There’s a man being pushed off a cliff, and a sprinkle of hotspots around the screen inviting me to delve deeper. I can switch between two modes, Exploring and Thinking, which are both fairly straightforward to pick up.
In Exploring mode, I scour the current scenario and find clues to explain what’s happening – who is the pusher, and who is being pushed? What kind of objects is the pusher carrying that might suggest his identity? I harvest key names, locations, and verbs, which fill the lower section of my screen like a bizarre set of fridge magnet words. These key terms come into play in Thinking mode, where I must fill in the blanks on a story scroll to explain the scenario and identify the people present.
Source – eurogamer.net
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