Rise of the Golden Idol review: Marvelous mind games

A murder is occurring when Rise of the Golden Idol begins. Well, a bunch of murders, technically, but you start the sequel to 2022’s excellent Case of the Golden Idol knowing about just the one. You know it in intimate detail, as it unfolds in front of you, and your job is figuring out who the monster currently strangling an asylum orderly with a chewed-off straight jacket cord is.

That might sound like the standard of mystery solving one expects from developer Gray Color Games. However, Rise of the Golden Idol quickly shows it’s more than just a standard sequel. It’s one of the best mystery games around.

Grim and groovy

Rise of the Golden Idol follows a structure similar to Case of the Golden Idol. An unseen detective – that’s you – investigates a string of brutal, unexplained murders spanning several years. They’re all connected, somehow, and they’re also all crimes that those in power are all too happy to sweep under the rug and hope no one remembers. Each story segment has a broad narrative that becomes clearer by investigating its associated cases, and after solving those, a few additional pieces of evidence appear that help connect it all.

Solving cases involves literally spelling out what happened in a given scene, usually some kind of tragic accident or bizarre scenario that defies easy explanation. Investigating points of interest and people adds words to a case’s vocabulary, and once you’ve got them all, you can try slotting them into blanks in a pre-made statement to form a solution.

Rise of the Golden Idol starts out on a surprisingly grim note with its asylum murder prologue and gets even darker during the next few cases – a “tragic accident” that was definitely no accident, which eventually leads you to a morgue where you have to study differences in how mangled four corpses are to identify a specific one. It’s heavy stuff and a sharp contrast with the comparatively goofy opening chapters of the first game, but Rise of the Golden Idol throws more lighthearted moments as well, like a car trip with an alien. 

All these cases unfold in the 1970s, swapping country house estates and remote islands where strange rituals take place in Case of the Golden Idol for busy city streets, drive-in theaters, and university laboratories. Putting Rise of the Golden Idol in the modern era removes the slightly farcical feeling Case of the Golden Idol has, and these more familiar settings give Rise of the Golden Idol’s cases added emotional weight. The player naturally forges a stronger connection to, say, a parent who does unspeakable things to help get their child through college than they do to the aristocrat who died after leaving his chess club. 

That feeling of closeness and shared experience also makes Rise of the Golden Idol feel darker, grimier, and more foreboding than its predecessor, a sense only furthered by the sequel’s art direction, which sheds the cartoonish look of the first game in favor of something more grotesque. An ancient artifact might ostensibly be behind all these dreadful deeds, but they’re things we could see ourselves doing as well.

What makes the setup so clever and helps tie it to the first game is that, underneath the modernity and supernatural mumbo jumbo, the driving force behind all the darkness is the same in the 1970s as it was in centuries past. The pursuits of power and status are still behind all the atrocities in Rise of the Golden Idol. The only difference is that modern technology gives people more ways to harm each other and themselves. That subtle little piece of commentary almost – but not quite – helps cover over how weak the actual central narrative is. Such a weakness is almost inevitable in this kind of story, though. Tales of the little tragedies of daily life, however exceptionally bizarre and bordering on the horrendous they might be, are more interesting than broad, vague plot beats about cults, mind control, and conspiracies. 

What really makes Rise of the Golden Idol brilliant, though, is how you uncover all these truths, and part of the brilliance comes from how the sleuthing challenges preconceived notions as more evidence comes to light. A suspicious family member who shows up at just the right time may actually be what they seem – a relative offering support. The stench of corruption is so strong from figures in power that the revelation of their wrongdoing is no shock at all, but the surprise comes from who it was who first pushed them down their path of self-serving deceit. And sometimes, there’s not even a bully, charlatan, or homicidal maniac at the center of a case. It’s just a really stupid person who made some really stupid choices.

It's in the details

The little moments where these realizations come to light, when a little piece of evidence or a small, overlooked environmental detail shifts your entire perspective, are exceptional. Color Gray understands what makes mysteries such as those Agatha Christie wrote so enticing and rewarding. Rise of the Golden Idol takes something really rather straightforward, shuffles the details around so they aren’t immediately easy to comprehend, and hides the most important pieces of information in small details or chains of logic that seem so obvious after you understand how to think about them, but impenetrable until you do. The satisfaction of figuring out what the game’s trying to say smooths over the instances where the way it tries telling you seems frustratingly obtuse.

The way Rise of the Golden Idol makes you engage so closely with the pieces of each mystery is just as satisfying as understanding what it all means. Cases feel manageable and even a bit small initially, but they soon become much more complex. You’ll juggle multiple lines of evidence strewn across several locations, deal with red herrings, try to understand plot teases with ties to the chapter’s overarching story, and several smaller mysteries that illuminate the case at hand. Like in Case of the Golden Idol, Rise only tells you half of what makes these discoveries and challenges important. Examining points of interest adds words to your word bank, but it won’t tell you how relevant they are to the case. That’s your job to figure out. A random letter in a trash can might be exactly that, or it could have a subtle clue to a key person’s motivations or their relationship to the crime.

It’s not just finding telltale clues in obscure places. Rise of the Golden Idol has you comparing witness testimonies, examining footage, separating truth and lies in a press broadcast, and piecing together how a prison break happened with a floor plan and a seemingly random collection of details. It’s one of the most creative collections of mysteries and methods in the genre.

It’s also a lot to deal with, but Rise of the Golden Idol sorts itself out in a much more user-friendly fashion than its predecessor. Rather than cramming an overwhelming number of verbs and nouns int a single word bank, it divides them into categories – verbs, nouns, proper nouns, special titles, and so on. Each important part of the case gets its own window you can move around or minimize, instead of putting them all together like Case of the Golden Idol does. It also shows you how many areas you’ve yet to examine and words you still need to track down, a helpful guardrail retained from the first game that provides some structure and direction.

These features make it all the more baffling that Rise of the Golden Idol lacks something like a memory bank. The only way to recall what you read on a computer drive or in a note someone showed you is by revisiting the location and interacting with it again. It’s a tedious annoyance, and having no option to examine important pieces of evidence in proximity to each other makes it harder than it should be to make important connections.

You might have to take notes outside the game to keep up, but it’s worth putting up with the annoyance. Rise of the Golden Idol is one of the most captivating mystery games around, one that makes clever use of every tool available to it and expands the possibilities of what a logical deduction game can achieve.

This review was based on a copy of Rise of the Golden Idol the publisher provided. Rise of the Golden Idol launches for Nintendo Switch on November 12, 2024, and is available now on other platforms.

Josh Broadwell

Contributing Editor

Josh is a freelance writer and reporter who specializes in guides, reviews, and whatever else he can convince someone to commission. You may have seen him on NPR, IGN, Polygon, or VG 24/7 or on Twitter, shouting about Trails. When he isn’t working, you’ll likely find him outside with his Belgian Malinois and Australian Shepherd or curled up with an RPG of some description.