It's been a real strong season for golden idols, between The Rise of the Golden Idol from last month and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle later this month (not that the Raiders statuette is likely to feature prominently but I know licensed video games love their dumb reference cameos), so I figured it was due time to head back to the distant year of 2022 and boot up that Golden Idol original. The Case of the Golden Idol from Latvian studio Color Gray Games (I believe this is my first Indie from that country—seen a few from its neighbor Lithuania though) is a deductive (or abductive? one of those) reasoning adventure game that primarily utilizes a keyword system that allows you to input who you think may have committed whatever grievous crime has occurred, should you have picked up their name somewhere. If the placed keywords match up with the correct answer, the scenario is complete... though the game is also generous enough to let you know that you're on the right track if you've only made a single error or two with your cogitation.

Your role isn't so much detective as it is an intangible purveyor of truth, passing through each crime scene like a ghost often while the crime in question is still happening. In each case you're given free rein of the environment, including the contents of safes, lockboxes, and the pockets of people involved (most of them carry knives, which doesn't help), and are allowed to scrape various keywords that are highlighted in any notes you find or statements a character might be making. They won't all be relevant of course—you have to have red herrings in a game like this—but there's a counter that lets you know once all these keywords have been found. It's then a matter of taking the information you've gleaned and piecing together the mystery in the game's Mad Libs-style drag-and-drop parser. Each scenario also has a selection of optional deductions to make—for instance, at a dinner party, you can figure out who sat where around the table based on the clues provided—and while there's no concrete gains to be had from these bonuses, they tend to be useful to solve smaller mysteries that may well contribute to the larger overarching "who killed this guy?" one. Very approachable system, but as you might expect in a tricky lateral thinking game like this the particulars aren't always immediately clear.

What's real cool about this game is that the twelve cases are linked as one contiguous story revolving around the titular golden idol, an artifact capable of draining and restoring various things like air or water. Its intricacies come up in a few puzzles and most of the game's events, not just the murders, tend to involve it in some way. Because many characters keep popping back up, between the villainous Cloudsley dynasty and the elusive Brotherhood secret society, you'll have a fair idea how and why the next murder case may have happened and who the likely participants might be. It's also fun to see characters appear, have a level of influence on the overarching plot going forward, and then get summarily dispatched, their deaths naturally prompting another round of questions and answers. Since you're not arresting anyone, it's highly possible that the perpetrator of one murder that got away clean then turns up as the victim in another. The wobbly art style took some getting used to but its uncanny nature really only enhances the game's overabundance of skullduggery and its venomous rogue's gallery: I felt some distinct Klasky-Csupo vibes while taking it all in (Gábor Csupó is Hungarian rather than Latvian though, a geographically minor but important distinction; damn, my detective instincts must've been awakened by this game, I really thought I had something there).

As always with adventure games, there's not much I can get into specifics-wise without taking too much from the experience of playing the game fresh, but if you're familiar with The Return of the Obra Dinn—if I may have the honor of being the 1,000th The Case of the Golden Idol review to mention Lucas Pope's maritime masterpiece?—there's a real close relationship here that doesn't so much scream "imitation", since they're very different in their approaches, but one that screams "hey, this should probably be its own genre already, huh?". A plea I happen to agree with: Classic logic squares (of the "well this can't be this, if that is that" type) recontextualized as whodunnit adventure games. By all means, keep making these things in whatever distinct format works best for you, crime adventure game developers.

Anyway, I probably don't need to keep praising this thing beyond saying that I don't really have a single complaint to make against it, which is pretty rare for a grumpy P.O.S. like me. There's the occasional bit of fuss where your take on something doesn't quite line up to the game's version of reality... until you think about it a little harder, and then you realize you were purposefully confounded with some misleading evidence. Like this one case where a guy was slumped over a table (well, coffin) half-conscious with a visible head wound while a nearby dude was waving a gun around, and I'd just quickly assumed the gun guy had marched into the place and shot him. There's no way he'd be slipping in and out of consciousness with a bullet through his head though, and it took a little more contemplating to realize what had actually happened. Since any given scenario has frozen at the pivotal moment of the crime, it's easy to forget sometimes that other stuff happened just prior to the freeze-frame too. The Case of the Golden Idol is full of moments like that, where it rewards your confidence for having all the right answers as often as it punishes your arrogance for assuming the same. After all, this game is quick to remind us that to be diligent in your truthfulness is a virtue, while wearing a dumb hat is very much not (yeah, I'm talking about you Stamp Guy; you're not off the hook yet).

Rating: 5 out of 5.