Rise of the Golden Idol (Switch) Review
Summary: The Rise of The Golden Idol is a solid follow up to one of the best mystery games of the last few years.
4.3
Just One More Thing
Rise of the Gold Idol is a worthy follow-up that retains the core of what made The Case of the Golden Idol so compelling while making some clever improvements to its presentation and moving the story forward in meaningful ways, while bringing newcomers along for the ride.
That being said, if you haven’t played Case of the Golden Idol (review in link), I would highly recommend it. It’s easily one of my favourite adventure games of the last few years, and having some idea of the history of what unfolds in Rise of is helpful, at least from a narrative perspective.
If you loved Case, though, there is no point in reading this review. Go and grab Rise of, and its detective pass, and dive right back into the weird world of the Golden Idol.
Are you still here? OK, fine, here’s why you should grab Rise of the Golden Idol.
Players once again are tasked with picking apart a series of unfortunate events in the guise of an omniscient detective in another captivating fly-on-the-wall whodunnit from Colour Gray Games.
Set several hundred years after the events of The Case of the Golden Idol, the acursed totem has passed into myth, and stories of it being used by a secret cabal to seize power are seen as conspiracy theories at best. However, there is a group that believes the idol exists and will stop at nothing to find it.
Each chapter in this grisly tale is presented to you as a grisly tableau showing the moment or immediate aftermath of a murder, or some other catastrophe caused in the pursuit of the idol. It’s up to you to rifle through the suspects’ pockets, cut through the noise, and use all of your deductive reasoning skills to identify who each of the players is in each scene and the series of events that lead to, for example, those cars bursting into flames at the drive in, or that auctioneer being drop kicked into a fuse box.
To get to the bottom of this, you collect dozens of keywords that are found in documents, descriptions of objects, and testimonies from the suspects and witnesses. These are then used to fill in the blanks in your notebook, revealing what happened and how it came to be.
It remains an elegant system that sets the series apart from other titles in the heavily codified adventure game genre. There’s no picking up a sack full of objects or trying to combine the frozen hamster with a microwave here, or using the bells with the whistles, or trying to make you spit thick. There’s none of that LucasArts nonsense here.
Instead, there’s plenty of deductive reasoning and admittedly a fair bit of trial and error in the later levels. However, if you are observant and really get your eye into each scene, Rise of the Golden Idol rewards your perspicacity, making you feel incredibly clever whenever you see through one of the game’s many, many red herrings (there are fishmongers with less).
If you do get stuck, though, there’s a pretty decent hints system that reminds you to look at the scene and consider everything in it before asking you to take a few deep breaths, before giving you a series of increasingly revealing hints, but never fully revealing the answer. I like this because it points you in the right direction, but still gives you the satisfaction of finding the solution.
The other alternative is to put it down for a couple of hours and think about it, and you are actively encouraged to do so. This is made easier by playing it on Switch since you can turn the system off and pick it up later. Chipping away at the solutions while getting on other tasks is something my neurodivergent brain has enjoyed over the course of playing it for this review, and I would highly recommend it.
This is something I often found I needed to do during some of Rise of’s chapter-ending puzzles, which involve pulling all the facts together to reveal a greater mystery that tread its way through the stages that make up each chapter of the game and can get incredibly complicated at times, escpecially in the late game when the stages themselves also ratcvhet up the difficulty substantially.
The presentation remains charming, Rise of the Golden Idol retains the same art style as the original, reminiscent of the glory days of adventure games, while replacing the previously mostly static 2D scenes with 3D environments and character models presented in the same way, but with a lot more life to them, as they nod their heads and emote, further enhancing the melodrama of each tableau.
The score is also excellent and continues to help convey the mood of each scene with a very less-is-more approach.
Final Thoughts
Rise of the Golden Idol is a superb follow-up that, although it doesn’t evolve the gameplay in any major way, it is still more Golden Idol, and that is no bad thing. Although it presents a more visually impressive tableau, the more granular modern tale doesn’t quite reach the same heady heights as the original. Regardless, Colour Gray Games has once again created a thrilling and deeply cerebral experience that fans of a good mystery (and feeling clever) will love.
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