Here’s a Steam quote for you: ‘The rise of the golden idol is the best game I’ve ever played, where I spent most of my time staring at the screen thinking “well, what is this?” is thisso?!” Devilish but fair, this detective puzzle demands a heady mix of observation, deduction, and logic, but rewards you with an increasingly engaging story and increasingly maddening and brilliant puzzles. Although you learned everything you need to know in the tutorial, it still manages to introduce new wrinkles and twists into the formula with each new chapter. My verdict? Imagine me lying on the floor, massaging my temple with one hand and giving a big thumbs up with the other.

The first scene takes place in a dingy asylum, where we are shown a nurse desperately crawling towards a baton while a patient chokes her with a strap. Later scenes will require us to answer the “why” and much more, but for now our job is to divulge the “who,” the “what” and the “where.” Certain objects and other points of interest are highlighted and examining them adds a selection of related words to our word box. Many of these words are unnecessary. Some of them are not. For example, the nurse’s badge has her name on it. “Ah” we think. “This will be useful for the ‘names’ objective.” We slip his name under his portrait and feel like Dale Cooper is doing it.

But what if we’re wrong, eh? In fact, we won’t know until we fill out all the names. The game will let us know if we have an incorrect “two or less”, but otherwise it’s a big “wrong” symbol, and back to the word box. But let’s say we know how name tags work and we sort them without problems? Then we move on to “events”: “The ‘profession’, ‘name nomson’, killed the ‘nickname nickname’ with an ‘item’ from a ‘different item’ in ‘named location.’ Drag the right words to the right places and, name your relative, you have solved the case. These sorts of context clues (“name”, “location”) aren’t on the actual sheet, but the game helps you out, both through syntax and color coding of certain word categories. Names are always red, for example.

The most important thing the game needed to address, in my opinion, is not letting what is effectively multiple-choice detective work become too easy to force. One way to do this is to simply have too many viable options. Once you’ve completed the tutorial, you’re dealing with half a dozen nouns minimum, and many points of interest will add extra words that aren’t needed at all to solve the case, or end up being so context-specific that you almost have to understand what happened to use them correctly. Besides these red herring words, there are plenty of red herrings in the stories that you have to solve, bastardized subplots specifically designed to confuse you.

The reason these storylines work so well to distract you is that, like everything in Golden Idol, they are all rooted in their own individual bits of a larger story. Each scene depicts not only the crime, plot, or other incident, but also the moments and sometimes days leading up to it. At first I found myself perplexed because I had developed tunnel vision only for points of interest. But what the game really wants you to do is take in the scene as a whole, including the parts that aren’t necessarily highlighted. A piece of fabric. An open window. What people wear. You may not be able to inspect these items to add additional words to your collection, but they are still crucial to ultimately putting all the pieces together.

Each scene tells its own story, of course, but I think it was around chapter three that I started wanting to resolve individual scenes not just for their own satisfaction, but because I was becoming invested in a more mystery. vast. The story jumps around in time, at one point showing recurring characters at different points in their lives. It’s extremely satisfying to begin to make connections based not only on what’s in front of you, but also on the context you already understand from the larger mystery that’s unfolding.

And that’s what makes The Rise Of The Golden Idol really special, I think – the way it brings out so much character and flavor from such a simple medium of interactivity. You can research safely knowing that you have all the tools you need to solve a scene, but still don’t feel constrained or hindered. It’s a wonderful example of a clean design pitch in one area – “fill in the blanks” – allowing for an incredible amount of variety and creativity in others.

I have a few complaints, but they’re basically just usability features that I would have liked to see. You will want to cross-reference a lot of information and thus open several windows at the same time. But I couldn’t find an option to resize them, which resulted in a lot of clutter on the screen. At the end of each chapter, you’ll fill out another timeline of events, but will still have to revisit scenes you’ve already played to remember crucial information – more detailed summaries of these you can access from the menu scene selection, where you will do this, would have been ideal.

That said, the most important accessibility feature – at least pointing it out as a reviewer who hadn’t played the previous game – was fixed exactly as it needed to be. I used clues a lotand not once did they remove the feeling of fun or mystery, with even the big ones still leaving me with plenty to chew on. All things considered, I really don’t have anything too deep or insightful to say about this one. Rise Of The Golden Idol is a more indulgent, satisfying, sometimes brain-dysfunctioning mystery that’s polished enough to match every time it makes you feel like a complete idiot, with another instance of making you feel like a genius.