Color Gray Games’ highly anticipated sequel to its critically acclaimed debut 2022 game, The Case of the Golden Idol, is set in the 1970s, 200 years after the events of the first game. The infamous idol, now scattered into pieces, is once again being hunted down to use for what can only be nefarious means considering the scope of its power which was revealed in the first game. Just like The Case of the Golden Idol, The Rise of the Golden Idol starts with how it ends. In an asylum, one of the patients has broken out of his cell and is strangling a guard to death. Who is this man and how did he end up there? This is the story that The Rise of the Golden Idol tells.
Just like in The Case of the Golden Idol, each of the five chapters of The Rise of the Golden Idol contain four scenarios. Most of the time, these are seemingly unrelated to each other by first appearances, but as you solve them and piece together what’s happened in between each scene to fill out the chapter summary, they all come together to tell one story. The gameplay also remains mostly the same, with the player needing to use point-and-click mechanics to explore each scene and find keywords to deduce what has happened in the scene. There will usually be extra puzzles to solve to show a true understanding of the case, such as naming each person or, in a scenario which took place in an apartment complex, working out who’s apartment is who’s for example.
There are some improvements to the original mechanics. For one, the time function first introduced in the first game’s DLC has made a return, allowing us to move back or forth in time in some scenarios to see how the scene has changed after several hours or even days. The ‘thinking’ screen has also been removed, instead there are now tabs in the toolbar which can be opened to pop up a window over the scene, so that the player doesn’t have to keep skipping back and forth between the scene and the puzzle they are trying to solve.
That being said, I wasn’t a fan of the new hint system. While The Case of the Golden Idol has you solving memory puzzles where you match names to an object or person in order to unlock the hints, The Rise of the Golden Idol has some strange breathing activity where the player is instructed to breath in and out for three seconds. I found the prior to be much more relevant and it also helped me memorise the names of the reoccuring characters. The hints remain as helpful as they were before, offering you several tiers of revealing clues to more point you in the right direction rather than outright giving you the answer.
This is where the similarities end. The Rise of the Golden Idol does a fantastic job at carrying over the mechanics and themes from the first game, which were already perfect and I would argue are therefore not worth changing, while also making the game feel new and fresh. The scenarios are just as challenging to solve, if not trickier in some aspects, and there’s greater complexity added to the multiple side plots going on which tie up at the end. The biggest change gameplay-wise is probably the length. The Case of the Golden Idol took me around four hours to complete whereas The Rise of the Golden Idol has nearly tripled this to over 13 hours long. To begin with, I was ecstatic about this as my one critique of the first game was that I wished I could have played more.
But what I thought would be The Rise of the Golden Idol‘s winning ticket to perfectionism actually turned into its downfall. The problem is that, unlike its predecessor, The Rise of the Golden Idol’s storyline just isn’t strong enough to withstand this length of time, whereas The Case of the Golden Idol’s story could have been. To begin with, it feels as though there’s too much going on at once, and by the time it clicks and we realise how all the characters are related and what their part in this plot is, we’ve forgotten about all the other details that we started with. As a result, when the plot wraps up at the end, it doesn’t feel nearly as satisfying because we’ve forgotten half of what it’s trying to give you a ‘eureka’ moment over.
On top of this, the twists just don’t hit the same way they did before. While The Case of the Golden Idol was filled with shocking revelations, both in the overarching plot and in the scenarios, The Rise of the Golden Idol has less of these and instead focuses on trying to get you to understand what’s going on. It also doesn’t help that I’m still unclear how the timeline works in this game, and it would have been better if we could have had a final summary to fill out which highlights the overall goings on in the game, such as the one we had in The Case of the Golden Idol which was ultimately how its twist ended up clicking in a spectacularly satisfying way. The Case of the Golden Idol made sure you understood exactly what has gone on throughout the game whereas The Rise of the Golden Idol doesn’t do this. And while the big twist in The Case of the Golden Idol is trickled throughout the game, the one used in The Rise of the Golden Idol is basically dropped in at the end and we don’t get much elaboration on it. In fact, I found that I had to piece together most of the ending summary through the keywords available because I felt like not enough of this information was in the scenarios themselves.
The second biggest change comes in the form of the audio and visuals. As mentioned before, The Rise of the Golden Idol does a tremendous job as a sequel. It carries over the recognisable themes and mechanics from the first game, but gives it a new lick of paint so that it feels like a sequel and not just a rehash. Set in the 1970s, The Rise of the Golden Idol has a more modern art style. While still maintaining a familiar look, it uses more painted strokes rather than bright illustrations. The colour palette is more realistic and befitting of the 70s. There’s some beautiful scenes in some scenarios thanks to the gorgeous use of colours and framing. To match this is a more ambient and futuristic soundtrack, replacing the medieval themes from before. I thought the soundtrack worked really well in building emotion or tension when I switched to a different viewpoint of a certain scene and different audio queues were triggered, such as changing the time and witnessing a murder take place as the music swells. It all comes together to bring forth an entirely different tone that works extremely well in this new age.
While The Rise of the Golden Idol still has engaging gameplay and many brilliant puzzles and scenarios to solve, unfortunately the storyline just didn’t click with me the same way The Case of the Golden Idol did. That being said, although I wasn’t as satisfied with the story, I thoroughly enjoyed my time with the game and there’s four DLCs lined up for next year which I’m really looking forward to.
Jess played The Rise of the Golden Idol on PC with a review code.
