In addition to our main Game of the Year Awards 2024, each member of the PC Gamer team is shining a spotlight on a game they loved this year. We'll post new personal picks, alongside our main awards, throughout the rest of the month.
There you stand, examining a crime scene scattered with clues—an open safe, a blinking light on an answering machine, a passport burning in a fire pit. There's also a rug that appears to have been pulled out of place, a torn curtain and a broken balcony railing, and, oh yeah, is that woman nonchalantly burying something in the yard? It's all a wee bit suspicious.
In mystery adventure The Rise of the Golden Idol, figuring out whodunnit is just the beginning: you also need to figure out how they dunnit and most importantly, why they dunnit. It's the perfect game for anyone who loves mystery novels and detective shows, because even once you've collected all the evidence and identified all the suspects, you'll still have to twist your brain into knots to put it all together so it makes sense—and each case you solve is just one small piece in a much larger and more ominous puzzle.
In 2022, developer Color Gray Games introduced us to a novel new way to untangle a murder mystery. With its crude art and grisly murders, The Case of the Golden Idol presented us with crime scenes frozen in time at the moment the victim horribly perished. We could then play detective, slipping notes from pockets, looking through desk drawers, and piecing together clues by gathering words: names, objects, and verbs. Then we used those words to fill in blanks to form a narrative of events, solving each of the dozen gruesome murders and learning a bit more about the thread connecting them all. What is the Golden Idol, and why are people so obsessed with it that they'll kill to possess it?
Some of the novelty of the original's crime-solving system is lost the second time around, but The Rise of the Golden Idol is still a fantastic sequel and an outstanding mystery game, plus it adds a few new tools to your detective's kit. The setting this time is the 1970s, and the Idol, responsible for all those murders in the first game, has been lost for centuries. But now it's reappeared and is being reassembled, and the moment it surfaces people begin dying once more, either by unfortunate accident or straight-up murder.
In Rise, not every mystery is a murder, which being a fan of Poirot and other murder dicks, I honestly am a wee bit disappointed by. But there are still plenty of bodies to clean up after, and even when a mystery doesn't involve a fatality, such as a brawl at a talent show or a fire in a science lab, they're still satisfying to piece together. And just as in the original game, the slow reveal of the overarching story, a fragment found in each individual case, would fit perfectly into a long, sprawling mystery novel.
In addition to clicking on items in each scene to gather clues, there are a few new twists that help with your investigations. One clever mystery involves playing and rewinding a video to examine a dancer's movements and determine their meaning by consulting a book. Similarly, a surveillance video recording a party on a boat can be watched and replayed to help you determine which guest stood in a particular spot at a particular time. Another fun scene lets you examine the same scene at two different times: once during an artifact auction, another an hour later when the lights have gone out and things have gone horribly wrong.
What I love about The Rise of the Golden Idol is what I love about the first game: yes, there's the intense satisfaction of gathering clues and identifying suspects and putting together the sequence of events that explain how a murder happened—but the cherry on top is the why of it all. The shadowy motives, the hidden agendas, and the slow reveal of secrets that eventually explain what's really going on. The story of The Rise of the Golden Idol would fit perfectly into a mystery novel, and with more cases coming next year as DLC, I can't wait to discover the next few chapters.
