The Rise of the Golden Idol review

pcgamer.com:

Imagine standing on the sidewalk in front of a block of apartments, but instead of seeing only closed doors and drawn curtains you can peer inside each room as if you had X-ray vision. In one apartment, a couple sits at a dinner table, but their body language suggests some awkwardness. Maybe it's a first date? The wall of a second apartment is covered with notes, diagrams, and red string connecting them: the occupant is investigating something, but what?

Finally you spot what you're here for: a dead body. A man lies on the floor of his apartment with a gun in his hand and a hole in his head, while in the laundry room someone else prepares to wash red stains off their shirt. That's a bit suspicious, isn't it?

In mystery adventure The Rise of the Golden Idol, it's your job at grisly crime scenes like this to sort out not just what happened, but how it happened, and especially why it happened. Just as in its prequel, The Case of the Golden Idol, the answers only come after exhaustively examining the scene, identifying the participants, and building a narrative of the events. Once again the cases are incredibly clever and solving them is almost always deeply satisfying, and each brings you a step closer to unraveling a central mystery that sprawls through the entire game.

200 years ago a strange and powerful artifact was found and immediately inspired people to start killing each other in order to possess it. That was the story in 2022's excellent The Case of the Golden Idol, one of the most inventive and challenging detective games I've ever played. In the sequel, which doesn't quite reach the original's heights but is excellent as well, developer Color Gray Games drops us into the gritty 1970s, where the long lost Idol has once again resurfaced. As various parties try to unravel its powers and gain control of the relic, wouldn't you know it? The bodies are stacking up again.

As in the first Golden Idol game, the scenes you examine in The Rise of the Golden Idol are