A gripping modern suspense thriller that’s bigger, better, and more ambitious than its already brilliant predecessor.
In Color Gray Games’ blockbuster debut, The Case of the Golden Idol, players take on the role of an 18th-century detective who solves 12 gruesome murders. In this almost contemporary sequel, the player suddenly decides to move the story forward 300 years. , which is really surprising. There seemed to be unfinished business to be further uncovered by the end of Kes’s machinations, and its detailed pixel art and eccentric cast also felt so in tune with its historical setting that I wondered if it was Fixed. Pictures far removed from their stylistic starting point can produce exactly the same effect.
Happily, the paranoia and political struggles of the 1970s provide the perfect backdrop for the evil deeds in “The Rise of the Golden Idol,” whose conflicts and ideological power struggles play out in the wider scene. . Always, but always with a keen eye for the chaos and collusion that characterized its illustrious predecessor. To say too much about its wider story would be to spoil its many twists and surprises, which are best left to be discovered by yourself. But as we move from Zen gardens and drive-in movie theaters to TV auction shows and corporate boardrooms, the scale and ambition of this heady story is evident—and it doesn’t always need a gruesome murder to inspire you Let’s see where this goes next.
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In fact, while the actual body count initially struck me as a bit low, The Rise of the Golden Idol proves that just as much drama and satisfying whodunit can be found in getting to the bottom of petty squabbles and prison breaks. Work. , a community picnic, and one particularly memorable sequence, a completely violence-free dance move, are just a few examples of the scenes you’ll point and click through over the course of its 12- to 13-hour runtime. Here’s a quick review for those who haven’t played The Golden Idol Case (you don’t need to have played The Golden Idol Case to fully enjoy this game), each scene invites you to explore a certain moment, no matter In or out of the game. The immediate consequences of a specific crime. Criminals, victims, witnesses and bystanders are all thrown into a panic as you dig through pockets, bins and belongings in front of you to figure out what happened and why, as each diorama has its own The ongoing story adds more new wrinkles.
The setting is as engaging as ever, and like Keyes, its best moments recall the mundane discoveries in Lucas Pope’s seafaring masterpiece The Return of the Obra Dinn. I’m still not sure if Rise surpasses Obra Dinn in this regard, but the process of discovering its pertinent facts now feels more alive thanks to Rise’s more modern, painterly visuals and freer-flowing animation loops. Here, exaggerated eyeballs, gnashing lips, and wild, arched limbs all come together to create blown-up close-ups that feel as personal as Case’s pixelated portraits, and for no scene-stealing murder As for the scenes that take all the attention, it’s the larger-than-life compositions of each scene that often draw you in from the start. Whether through the use of brighter, more vivid colors, contrasting light sources or cleverly staged casting, some of these scenes could almost be seen as crazy cousins of American realist paintings, such as Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks.”
However, these scenes don’t just look appealing, as they’re also filled with tiny, incidental details that you need to analyze and internalize in order to make sense of the chaos before you. Rise makes some new concessions here, marking more clearly which “places” still require more thorough investigation, while also collecting all relevant names, verbs and nouns as soon as you click on important objects and people. The former is a welcome improvement, greatly reducing the back-and-forth searching for the final clue needed to complete a scene, but I do feel the latter might be a bit much. I really enjoyed the manual word-gathering process in The Case, but here everything is handed to you on a plate, depriving you of some important detective work in the process.
That said, there’s a lot more information to parse here than in Case, and as the scenes started to get more complex, I did start to appreciate the overall smoothness of Rise’s evidence gathering. This is mostly because there’s a lot more for you to figure out on your own in these scenarios, and the words themselves are really just the tip of the iceberg. The real detective work comes from shaking all these facts around in your head, and if you don’t record the amount in your wallet and checkbook when the lights go out in a two-part auction murder, it’ll piece together the torn pages of a birdkeeper’s manual Or just name the residents of two four-story apartment buildings based on snippets of conversation, personal belongings, and some good old-fashioned logic.
Of course, the cases had these side puzzles, but they were always more like fun optional extras than the main event – it was always filling in the blanks of the main murder reel to figure out whodunits, causes, and clues. how. Here, however, they are more closely integrated into the overall structure of the mystery at hand, often requiring you to solve them first before gaining access to the main “story” panel. As a result, the mystery itself feels more complete and the plot denser, even if the scenes feel random in nature or seem unrelated to what’s happened before. It all comes together in the end, and it’s a testament to Color Gray Games’ deft and complex storytelling that Rise deftly juggles so many threads without missing a beat in building suspense.
This process is greatly aided by new panels of end-of-chapter puzzles that must be solved before proceeding to the next part of the story. Not only do they tie together each chapter’s handful of scenes, but they also serve as an important test of your overall knowledge to date, ensuring you fully understand the significance of what you’ve just played before you’re allowed to move on. Granted, it doesn’t always strike the right balance – while some people feel like they’ve made important mental connections in solving these problems, others feel like I’m just reliving the same old problem I solved just minutes before. question. Mostly, though, these panels – along with the extra items that appear on each chapter’s scene selection screen – form important bookends to Rise’s ongoing mystery, and you’ll need to pay careful attention to each one of them as you solve them. Rise’s wonderfully climactic final scene.
Having said that, I think there are still some bumps left that need some more polishing. For example, dates play an increasingly important role in the later parts of Rise, and while much of the game takes place in order, certain scenes are still presented out of order, and if you’re not paying very close The cost can lead to some confusion in asking the line to pay attention to the month or year. It’s one of the few pieces of information that isn’t easily summarized or collected for later reference, leading to some pretty laborious scene jumping when double-checking your facts (despite the fact that you can easily navigate to different information) The scene is another very A welcome addition).
Its word-based solution is also still somewhat susceptible to brute force answers, as each space is still color-coded according to its respective word type. For example, red spaces are always names, blue spaces are always verbs, etc. On one hand, I’m not sure setting them all the same color would necessarily help, since you’re often dealing with too many words at once for this approach to work, and I think I’d just feel even if I didn’t have the initial color coding If I had a foothold, I would go further on the sea.
On the other hand, sometimes within these defined word pools, the surrounding sentence structure can still reveal too much information. For example, the tenses of some words may not match, or the presence/absence of articles or prepositions further narrows your choices, allowing you to effectively guess a few through a process of elimination rather than correct logical reasoning based on facts alone. The correct answer for the case. To be fair, this is an issue Keyes has been grappling with as well, and I can only imagine the linguistic tweaks that had to be made to ensure these scenes worked not just in Color Gray Games’ native Latvian, but also in English and 11 other languages. juggling. Available in Rise’s settings menu. But until it succeeds in putting a stop to this looser fabrication of facts, for me it will forever be a step behind Return of the Obra Dinn, which remains the undefeated in the realm of blank-file detectives The master.
(Although there was a pretty significant point in my pre-release version of the game that I’m sure almost certainly had Was The error about the missing article significantly changes the meaning of the attached sentence. I hope this issue will be resolved by the time Rise is released, but if you’re stumped by it, please consider yourself warned/absolved).
Still, even in the face of these admittedly minor pitfalls, I can’t deny the broader achievements of “Rise of the Golden Idol” almost elsewhere. It’s a well-plotted thriller with a cast of memorable villains, clowns, and silently miserable bystanders, all backed by well-crafted puzzles that, before you’re able to pry open its hard puzzles, Puzzles can really give your brain a good spin – secrets won. It’s everything you can expect in a sequel to Golden Idol and more, and with word that even more content is coming next year, I can’t wait to see what Color Gray Games does next in this fantastic mystery series Where will it take us.
A copy of The Rise of the Golden Idol was provided for review by publisher Playstack.
