I’m Finally Playing The Case Of The Golden Idol And It Should Spawn Its Own Genre (2024)

You could call The Case of the Golden Idol a point-and-click adventure game. It wouldn’t adequately describe what’s going on in that game, but you could call it that. It is a game where you point at objects and click on them to gather information, but that's fairly reductive. The truth is that it’s like no other point-and-click game I’ve ever played, and I’m kicking myself for taking so long to get around to it. But, hey, at least I got in on the fun before its sequel The Rise of the Golden Idol arrives later this year.

The Cold Case Of The Golden Idol

I first started hearing great buzz about The Case of the Golden Idol upon its release in October 2022. I didn’t know much about it, but it was one of those indies that prompted those, “Be sure to make time for it before you make your GOTY list," tweets. I didn’t make time, because I didn’t have any. I was trying to finish God of War Ragnarok, Pentiment, and a bunch of other games, and made the bad call to skip it. And because no game is as hard to motivate yourself to play as one that came out last year, I didn’t actually get around to it until it hit Game Pass in July.

I’m glad I finally did because it’s the first point-and-click I've played since 2018’s Unavowed that feels like it’s doing something completely different with the genre. That supernatural adventure from Wadjet Eye Games took a BioWare-style companion system and incorporated it into an adventure game that was otherwise pretty traditional. It was extremely cool, but The Case of the Golden Idol is much more structurally daring, throwing out much of what we traditionally associate with point-and-click adventure games while retaining an aesthetic that would fit right in with ‘90s greats like Day of the Tentacle.

A New Take On Point-And-Click Mechanics

The biggest difference it has to staples of the genre is that you can’t move around. In fact, you’re not even controlling an on-screen character. Instead, you’re a disembodied observer, sifting through tableaus that are frozen at one specific moment in time.

The game sets this dynamic up early. The prologue scenario takes you to a moment that clearly could only last a fraction of a second, as one man has pushed another off a cliff into the ocean below. As you begin the scenario, he’s still hanging in the air and will continue to float there as long as you're still poking around for clues. As the men remain frozen as if in amber, you can search them to see what they have on their person and pick through the nearby campsite to see what’s in their packs. In each, you find clues, which add words and names to a list that you will eventually use to MadLibs together a hypothesis for what happened at the scene.

It’s a lot like Return of the Obra Dinn, but instead of exploring a boat in first-person, you’re shifting from viewpoint to viewpoint like a child peering into a dollhouse. It’s totally unique, but also strikes me as endlessly replicable. The Case of the Golden Idol takes place over four decades in the 1800s, but there’s no reason you couldn’t apply this formula to a cyberpunk city, a remote Ancient Greek isle, a modern state fair, Paris in the 1920s, a delicatessen in a college town, a high fantasy library. In fact, The Rise of the Golden Idol is set to take players to the 1970s. The format is so flexible, while still having incredibly specific mechanics, that it feels like it could spawn its own genre. The good thing about being so late to the party is that developers who were inspired by it have had a two year head start on those games. Lucky me.

The Case of the Golden Idol

The Case of the Golden Idol sees you investigate the titular Idol, an artifact of power passed down throughout the ages. It takes elements from point-and-click adventures of yore, as you uncover how events unfolded.

Platform(s)

PC , Switch

Released

October 13, 2022

Developer(s)

Color Gray Games

See at Nintendo eShop