The Rise of the Golden Idol: The hypnotic allure of an engrossing mystery game

Narrative games strike a difficult balance between gameplay and story. The writer's concern is how the game conveys narrative meaning, while the designer's concern is how the game incorporates elements that make it entertaining. Outside of experimental or text-based games, it's really rare for a game to intertwine its story so closely with the gameplay that one can't be described without the other. The Rise of the Golden Idol, a sequel to the acclaimed 2022 title The Case of the Golden Idol, promises to continue a series that immerses players in a complex and fascinating story, having them piece it together every step of the way.

Similar to its predecessor, Rise is a mystery puzzle game in which players are shown a scene, often of a character's death, fixed at a point in time. The player interacts with characters and objects in the scene to gain clues in the form of phrases, such as names, concepts, and verbs. These words are used to fill in the blanks in a menu or menus describing the events occurring in the scene. The stage is complete when the player understands the scene well enough to correctly fill in the blanks with all available phrases. Often, the challenge comes from characters not being identified, requiring players to infer roles and relationships.

The narrative of the Golden Idol series centers around the titular and coveted Idol and its passage through chapters of history. In Case, the Idol changed hands through the entangled affairs of upper-class families in the eighteenth century. Rise takes a much more contemporary approach, setting its events in the twentieth century. The demo of Rise includes the game's first chapter, "The Curse," which is squarely set in the period and aesthetics of the late seventies. The subject matter is no less gruesome, with the demo covering a string of suspicious deaths under the "red curse," which no doubt the supernatural qualities of the Idol are embroiled in.

An immediate impression of the sequel's progress is the improvement in artstyle. Rise takes a smoother, more painterly approach, composed in brushstrokes. Character animations feel more naturalistic and a little less interpolated, an approach the developers experimented with in the Golden Idol Mysteries DLC. Personally, I miss a little bit of the uncanny, dithered detail of the original, although the strange and grotesque character art is still there in all its glory. As a game thematically tied together by death, it also does not deal in undertones, and Rise shows quite directly the gory ends of each of its doomed characters.

There are several changes to the gameplay as well. Chapters in Rise now have meta-puzzles, requiring players to piece together the story between chapters. The menus are a bit more dynamic and can move around, as can the phrases in the list of clues, which will no doubt help when things get much more complicated. By the third case, the player has quite the task on their hands already: attempting to decipher the meaning of a police press conference and putting a name to the surrounding characters and unidentified victims that lie in a morgue above.

Fundamentally, though, the approach to Rise is about the same as its predecessor, and all the brilliance and bother that carries. It continues to capture the a-ha moment when complexity turns to clarity, reserved only for the greatest of puzzle games such as Return of the Obra Dinn. However, its impeccably designed hints have the same achilles heel as they did in Case. For instance, it still remains a viable, if underhanded, strategy to brute force guess the remaining clues in a menu, as each menu will let you know when you're almost close to the solution.

The demo is a great introduction to a mystery that will undoubtedly become fuller and more engrossing with the release of the complete game. The titular Idol is yet to make an appearance, so that's got to turn up at some point, right? If the demo and pedigree of the original game are anything to go by, Rise should capably enlighten the player on how its puzzle pieces ultimately fall into place.

Rise is being created by Color Gray Games, the studio of Latvian brothers Andrejs and Ernests Kļaviņš. Founded in 2021, the brothers created the Golden Idol series in evocation of the visual presentation and gameplay of 1990s adventure titles.

A demo for The Rise of the Golden Idol is available on Steam, with an expected release date by the end of 2024. The full game will contain 20 scenarios.