The Rise of the Golden Idol review: you need to solve this hilarious mystery

digitaltrends.com:

The Rise of the Golden Idol Score Details Pros

• Excellent deduction
• Creative new puzzle templates
• Great new visual style
• Hilarious, gripping mystery

• Mad Lib style encourages brute forcing
• Garbled grammar in some solutions

In 2022’s The Case of the Golden Idol, I’m sleuthing my way through a series of murders committed by cunning killers. In its next chapter,The Rise of the Golden Idol, I’m dealing with morons.

Color Gray Games’ puzzling sequel retains all the same hooks that made its predecessor a breakout success. It’s a brainy deduction game where players have to piece together the details of chaotic crime scenes by finding key words and slotting them into a Mad Libs-style explanation. The difference isn’t just visual though; The Rise of the Golden Idol twists that core idea into a 1970s comedy of errors about people toying around with power they can’t possibly understand. It all makes for a hysterical sequel that one-ups its already impressive predecessor, even if it’s still beholden to the same foundational flaws.

The idol returns

The Rise of the Golden Idol wastes no time in getting its groove back. Right from the jump, I’m dropped into a simple murder scene as one unnamed character strangles another. I click around the screen to find clues, documents, objects, and more, which then become words I can work with. From there, I need to figure out exactly what happened, identify everyone in the scene, and put the words I have into an “events” sheet that ultimately explains what happened. That formula was a satisfying evolution of Return of the Obra Dinn’s excellent deduction hook, and it still feels just as great to crack a case here.

That formula does still have its shortcomings, though, which persist here. The core problem I had with The Case of the Golden Idol in 2022 was that some of its more obtuse puzzles could be too easily brute forced. When the going gets tough, the event sheets can often be deduced simply by reading into