Played on PC
Game designer Lucas Pope rarely releases games, and he doesn’t seem to like repeating himself, so you shouldn’t expect a sequel or an analogue of Return of the Obra Dinn from him. But I want something similar: a detective story in which you study the evidence and reconstruct the picture of what happened in a notebook with numerous omissions. This is where the Color Gray Games team comes to the rescue – its previous game, The Case of the Golden Idol, was a wonderful detective puzzle, and now we also got a sequel – The Rise of the Golden Idol. The effect of novelty is no longer there, but it is not needed here – the passage still gives vivid emotions.
⇡#Another era, other crimes
If the first part of the series took us to the 18th century, where we spent time among aristocrats in white wigs, then in the sequel the era is different – the seventies of the last century. There are fewer murders this time, but the total number of crimes has increased, and we still act as a kind of observer from the outside. Each scene is more like a painting, capturing the moment of a crime or the situation after it. Our task is to study every point on the screen (and sometimes several) and understand what happened, why and who is to blame.
The figures and objects in each scene are motionless
Launching another case, we find ourselves in a location strewn with various objects and people. Next to some of them hangs a barely noticeable exclamation mark, which periodically turns into a question mark – this means that some valuable information is hidden there and you can study something more closely: look into an open safe, enlarge a poster on the wall, pull out a box from table, read the note, and so on. And in the case of people, you will look at their faces and see a couple of their remarks – sometimes they turn out to be very useful, including in the very first task, which seems to be training, but even there they only lead you by the hand at the beginning.
About half the time, interacting with an object allows you to collect a few words (literally) that will be useful later. Someone mentions an accident – this word is transferred to “inventory”. We looked at the calendar – numbers from 0 to 10 are sent there. If you met someone or looked at the signature on a note, your first and last name will also come in handy. The number of words varies in different cases, usually there are several dozen. If in the first part of the series you had to click on each such word, then in the sequel the collection occurs automatically – this is one of the changes that seems to be insignificant, but makes the passage more comfortable.
Is the name of the radio station useful? What if!
⇡#A good detective needs ____ and ____
The ultimate goal in each episode is to produce a report in which you fill in all the blanks perfectly. For example: “____ ____ entered ____ and hit ____ ____.” Although the word “hit” may also have to be inserted into the report yourself – here you need to manually select names, verbs, and nouns. It is assumed that the player will have a complete picture of what happened in his head, so in addition to the report, he needs to fill out several more sheets, which are constantly changing and make each case unique.
For example, you find yourself at an auction where someone’s outbid could lead to a crime. Before putting forward your version, you need to look at the lots, read all the monologues, find all the clues and distribute the lots and the buyers who claimed them on a separate sheet. Or you find yourself in a prison from which someone has escaped – first you need to look at all the prisoners who were lined up on the street, and somehow understand which of them was in which cell. There are a lot of such funny puzzles, and they are not repeated – for example, in one of the episodes you will place the names of actors on a movie poster, and in the future there will not be exactly the same moment.
Sometimes it seems like there are too many words and gaps, but if you take your time you can fill it all in (almost) without problems.
Sometimes the process seems a little routine – for example, if the same first and last name is used several times in a report and you have to drag them from one window to another over and over again. However, this does not take much time, including because the interface has become much more convenient compared to the first part. Here it looks more like the interface of Papers, Please! with the ability to drag windows, like on a desktop, and quickly minimize them with one button. In addition, the task never becomes too difficult – there are a lot of words, but they are divided into categories and colored in different colors, as are the cells on the sheets attached to the case. So if you see a blue cell, and there are only five blue words, it is much easier to search for the correct one among them.
But the game cannot be called easy either – sometimes you have to completely immerse yourself in this or that matter and literally think like a criminal. Although there is a lot of valuable information in dialogues and notes that helps fill in the gaps, from time to time you need to pay attention to what is not highlighted in any way. For example, a badge on a character’s uniform may indicate not only his name, but also his nationality. And then the new cases that we investigate are connected with each other, and the knowledge gained in previous episodes can be useful to solve the next puzzle. There are even reports on the results of entire chapters, consisting of several cases – to make it easier to understand the central plot, you are offered to literally collect it manually, which allows you to immerse yourself even better in what is happening.
Mostly the characters are laconic and speak as much as necessary
***
Surely no one would mind if Golden Idol games were released every couple of years. Judging by the quality of the sequel, the developers have not run out of imagination – on the contrary, they managed to come up with even more tricky situations and riddles, for the sake of solving which you spend evenings in front of the screen with great pleasure. There are no new original ideas here compared to the first part, but there are gameplay improvements that make solving cases even more interesting. And if you really like the game, then you can take the season pass – next year its owners will receive as many as four additions with new investigations.
Advantages:
- A set of interesting detective stories, different from each other;
- Exciting process of filling in gaps in reports;
- A convenient interface that allows you to quickly access the necessary information;
- Cute pixel art.
Disadvantages:
- Filling in the blanks with the same names is sometimes depressing;
- Icons near points of interest are not always immediately noticeable.
Graphic arts
The pixels in the sequel are not as large, so there are more details in the locations and the characters can be seen better. Often this even needs to be done.
Sound
Pleasant mysterious music – nothing special, but nothing to complain about.
Single player game
Two dozen unique cases in which the mechanics do not change, but the environment and puzzles are completely different. Therefore, interest is not lost, even if the crime in one chapter or another is not as remarkable as in the others.
Estimated time of completion
12 o’clock.
Collective game
Not foreseen.
General impression
A sequel that didn’t significantly change the formula, but improved it and offered to solve a pack of new unique crimes. The developers have clearly not run out of imagination, so we are waiting for new games in the series – even if the gameplay does not differ at all from this one.
Rating: 9.0 / 10
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