2022's best detective game is getting a new case this month

pcgamer.com:

Every morning I go through my email and find various announcements from game developers, publishers, and PR firms. There's always lots of news about expansions, season passes, release dates, events, game updates, and betas, and they're almost always perfectly straightforward: a few paragraphs of text and a link to a trailer, a Steam page, a website, or a presskit.

Almost always. Today I received a rather unusual email, not from a game's PR but from a game's character, and it hints at a mystery we'll get to unravel later this month:

Dear associate,

The Seven Seas Company has reviewed and approved your request to partake in the upcoming Lanka trading expedition. You and two other associates will personally accompany yours truly on this mission.

A partial travel itinerary has been included.

Albert Cloudsley

I recognized the name immediately—Albert Cloudsley is a character from The Case of the Golden Idol(opens in new tab), an inventive mystery adventure and 2022's best detective game. There was no link to a trailer or proper press release, and the «partial travel itinerary» was the image below, where you can see an intimidating figure in a demonic mask holding a lantern. Scrawled on the wall above them is the word April.

Time to do some detective work! I asked my PC Gamer colleagues in Slack if they'd received an email too, and no one had. (In truth they completely ignored my question because they were busy talking about something else.) To Twitter, then, where I searched for recent mentions of Case of the Golden Idol.

I saw that Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier had received the same email and image(opens in new tab) I had. However, Destructoid's senior news reporter Eric Van Allen had received a slightly