Summary

The Rise of the Golden Idol is a sequel to 2022's Case of the Golden Idol. It is developed by Color Gray Games and published by Playstack. The detective game has you solving a series of strange cases set in the 1970s. The idol is back and humans are as sinful as ever.

Very exciting and terrifying. I needed a break after Case of the Golden Idol to rest my weary mind, but we are now back and ready to go.

Review

This series is excellent. This was a great followup to The Case of the Golden Idol. I think it did an excellent job of capturing the most satisfying moments of deduction that the first game did. I had some very good "Oh!" moments. Where something odd that was seen previously gets recontextualized and suddenly a number of things slot into place and make more sense. It's hard to repeatedly do that, so I have to tip my hat to the devs for managing it repeatedly. They've got their finger on the pulse.

I will say that I was generally less interested in the overarching plot of this one compared to the last one. I think the first game had a better "turn". There's the moment we realize the idol is capable of transferring an abstract concept like years and it's in the hands of an English asshole and suddenly we see "Oh...this is what the game's gonna be about". I think the concept of the memory transferring is definitely just about as interesting as the years. But I feel it gets used in a way that I'm more familiar with trope-wise. I just felt like I had seen this one before in a number of different places. Specifically the corporatism, dunce failing their way to the top angle. Is that not everywhere? Just to be clear, I think it's well-written and everything. It's also just a bit more derivative than the first game was.

I do find myself very interested to see where they might go from there. My big takeaway from the ending is that it felt way more open-ended than Case did. With both Oriel/Echo and Jack/Isaac out there, that really feels like sequel hook to me. Whereas Case generally cleaned up after itself. All the main movers and shakers were either dead, or of course Idol-less. Here we've got a number of people with full knowledge of the I.D.O.L. and various other Lemurian stuff still running around.

A great puzzle game in general and a good sequel to the original.

Links

Playlist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4Y_57HxWSY&list=PLXbBIoFOxaQvy_2r4uYhRuMzFC5ZNH3vh