The Case of the Golden Idol

It’s hard to say much about the Case of the Golden Idol, because it’s a really good mystery game, so this might be kind of a short post. The basic premise is that you are a disembodied observer investigating a tableau in which someone is about to or has recently died, sometimes accidentally, usually from a murder. You examine the scene for clues and a bunch of words go into a little word inventory, and then you use those words to fill out some mad libs to demonstrate you’ve figured out what happened. The mad libs turn green if you got it exactly right, yellow if just one or two blank spots are wrong, or red if three or more are wrong, so you can’t brute force the solution but if you’ve got exactly one name or murder weapon or whatever out of place, you’ll know that you need to make a small tweak rather than throwing your whole theory out to start from scratch. Because you’re looking at a tableau where everyone has just one or two lines of dialogue from a single moment in time, often step one is finding out who all these bickering assholes even are, and then you can start piecing together who killed who and why.

The game takes place in an 18th century Strangereal-type setting, recognizably similar to the real world but with the exact geography and nations and so forth altered slightly so that it’s not beholden to real history at all. The game takes place in Albion, which is exactly like 18th century England except in that it’s not at all weird that one of the local aristocrats went on an expedition to Lemuria to retrieve the titular golden idol, which is going to be relevant to eleven different untimely deaths for reasons that probably have nothing to do with a curse. The tableaus are only loosely connected at first, but about three or four tableaus in, consistent characters start to emerge and a greater mystery of conspiracy and occultism starts to tie all the murder scenes together.

Mechanically speaking, I found the game to be a very good level of difficulty for mystery solving. Untangling what had happened in several of the tableaus was quite difficult, but I was able to finish the entire game without giving into the temptation to ask for hints. The first tableau is so trivially easy that I don’t even consider it a spoiler to describe: One character is shoving another off a cliff, with the tableau frozen at the moment the victim is plummeting to his death. You rifle through the effects of the characters (which, because you are a disembodied observer in a tableau frozen in time, has no impact on the scene) to find a contract with both their names on it and some clues as to which one’s the doctor and, by process of elimination, which one’s the other guy, and bam, you successfully solved the mystery of who shoved the doctor off the cliff. It was the guy who was shoving the doctor off the cliff. Then in the second tableau it’s straightforward but non-obvious and you’ll probably fall for a red herring before figuring it out, and from the third tableau on things start to get properly challenging. I never felt like I had to resort to cheap game-y tricks like cycling every possible remaining word through a single empty spot or similar, and instead all of the mysteries were solved by examining clues.

Very strongly recommended game, the Case of the Golden Idol is pretty much perfect at being what it is, if you have any interest in a mystery-solving game about 18th century occult murders, then this game absolutely nails it.