I'm extremely here for the rise of the Golden Idol-like

rockpapershotgun.com:

Graham remarked the other day about how strange it can be to see which indie megahits spawn waves of homages and which ones don't, noting that Lucas Pope's Papers, Please has surprisingly few immitators. His post reminded me of Pope's other hit, Return Of The Obra Dinn. The closest we've come to a "Dinn-like" is probably 2022's outstanding The Case Of The Golden Idol, though as I said in my review, its fill-in-the-blanks murder tableaus felt just about distinct enough to be their own separate thing.

Happily, the "Golden Idol-like" appears to be having a bit of a moment of its own right now, as Playstack, the publishers of Golden Idol, have just announced the delightful-looking Little Problems, a detective game that turns its word-shuffling problem-solving to the altogether more relatable conundrums of everyday life. And I couldn't be more here for it.

Alas, there's no trailer for Little Problems just yet, but we can glean several clues about what you'll be doing in it from a browse of its website. You'll be playing as Mary, a college student who appears to be a bit haphazard, and whose cat Luca is an expert in getting into trouble. Like The Golden Idol, you'll be collecting words from various documents and objects in Mary's life, such as her phone and calendar and arranging them into sentences to work out whodunwot and why.

From the screenshot below, you can see Mary won't be dealing with any grizzly murders or actual crimes, per se - unless you count a broken cup inside your own apartment as property vandalism of the highest order. But that's precisely the point - the game is called Little Problems, after all. Indeed, Playstack say they hope its everyday setting and low-key good vibes will make it a good entry point into the genre, as well as a cosier alternative to The Golden Idol's grandiose backstabbing puzzle plots.

The website's comic book dev diary from solo developer Posh Cat Studios is well worth a read, too, as they explain how they arrived at the