I love games that let me do some sleuthing. I love puzzles, I love drama, and I love complex narratives. I’d heard The Case of the Golden Idol has it all, but I’d never gotten the chance to check it out myself, so when I saw it was on sale with its new DLC, I took the plunge. This point-and-click title makes me feel like a real detective. Each scene is a freeze-frame, and you get to click in to see what people are carrying, saying or thinking, and their surroundings. You can see what’s inside drawers, what people are hiding under their beds, and what documents in the room might say. Oh, and there’s always at least one dead body.

You play the game by investigating people and things, and clicking on highlighted keywords to add to your journal. When you’ve got all the keywords, you piece them together by dragging them into blanks in sentences. These scrolls may be asking you to deduce where the suspects were when a body was found, or to unravel the order in which a certain object was passed between people. A lot of the time, you’ll be putting names to faces, and all of the time, you’ll have to work out what happened to the dead person on your screen. I have, on occasion, worked out the solution to the mystery without filling in all the available scrolls, but the process of doing so is fun enough that I always finish them all up before continuing to the next mission.

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But don’t underestimate the difficulty of these puzzles. They sound easy in theory, but in practice, you’ll be scratching your head. It’s not that their solutions don’t make sense, it’s that your assumptions will sometimes lead you astray. The Case of the Golden Idol also has an excellent hint system – excellent in that you have to work to get them. You’ll have to match keywords to items to get hints that vaguely point you in the right direction. Everything in this game is designed to make you think, not to spoon-feed you the answers.

Gameplay screenshot of a candlelit room with a fiddler, people playing cards, and a man behind a bar

These aren’t disconnected scenes either. Each conclusion leads you further down a path that spans years of in-game time, and its epilogue is entirely killer. I love this game, particularly because of the intricate story it weaves throughout your time with it. I’m not very far into the DLC, which brings us new characters in a new setting. Some might be wary of shelling out money for only three paltry missions, but goddamn, are these missions hard. I’m on the second one, and am truly wracking my brain to understand what’s going on, but I know that in true Golden Idol fashion, the mystery will take time to unravel. Either way, I’m having loads of fun. Lots of people missed the game when it first launched last year, but it's well worth the time you put into it. Don’t miss it this time round.

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