The Case of the golden Idol: small relic seeks big brain

An idol to rule them all

January 5th, 1742, the date of the original sin. Albert Cloudsley and Oberon Geller, guided by a map that leads them to the island of Monkey Paw, get their hands on a strange golden statuette, the so-called golden Idol. The game begins with a first panel in which one of the characters is murdered by the other. I won’t say more here, so as not to spoil the surprise of the first investigation. All I can say is that this first murder is the beginning of a case that will unfold over more than fifty years. The magical artifact is coveted by all who know of its existence. Some (many?) of them are even prepared to kill in cold blood to get their hands on the coveted object.

If the story begins as a family drama, it’s only to make that framework explodes later on. Occult groups, bandits, aristocrats, domestic servants, and politicians rub shoulders with unlikely alliances and surprising twists.

And it’s these characters that are the game’s greatest asset. The Case of the Golden Idol introduces us to ambiguous caracters with unclear motivations. While it literally throws us into the middle of the fray each time, the game’s strength lies in its ability to gradually immerse us into its universe. Each scene, chaotic and seemingly incomprehensible at first, gradually reveals its underlying order. Likewise, as the player progresses from scene to scene, he or she grasps the ins and outs of the entire imbroglio.

Investigator, not pixel hunter

The player’s only task is to organize information. Each level is an almost frozen panel that reveals a scene – usually a crime scene. Set in one or more rooms (e.g. several rooms in the same house), each panel first invites us to gather the information at hand. This is where The Case of the Golden Idol stands out: all the clues you can collect are highlighted (although you can turn this off via an option for the more adventurous), and you know at any given moment how many remain to be discovered (generally around thirty) and how many you’ve already had in your hands. The developers’ intention is to avoid embarrassing the player with the infamous pixel hunt that has been the bane of many fans of the genre, because the heart of the matter lies elsewhere! In fact, the “panel” is only one of two gameplay screens available to the player. Each clue you find is added to a list of words at the bottom of the screen.

Once all the information is collected, you are invited to go to the reflection screen. Each time, the goal is to fill in the blank text on the left. The middle and right sections are more contextual: they vary from scene to scene and appear as the player gathers clues and visits the scene, but the principle is always the same: fill in the blanks with the words at your disposal. Sometimes you’ll need to identify the various characters in the scene, sometimes you’ll need to find out who was sitting where at the table, or who owns this room, or who this letter was addressed to, etc. These two sections are there to help the player fill in the left-hand section and understand who committed the irreparable act, how, and why!

While each scene provides almost all of the elements needed to solve the puzzle, it’s worth noting that the game regularly invites the player to revisit certain levels that have already been solved, especially at the beginning when you’re not quite familiar with all the characters; in fact, some of the central individuals appear from one painting to the next, and you need to be able to identify them without an explicit clue in the current scene. While this can be a little frustrating at first, it’s easy to move from one scene to the next, and you’ll soon feel – more or less, depending on your memory – familiar with all these odd fishes.

The Case of the Golden Idol may never be insurmountable, but it does offer an interesting challenge. Except for the first panel, which serves as a tutorial, you’ll never understand what’s going on if you just go through the clues once. You’ll have to keep going back and forth between the exploration screen and the puzzle screen, and there’s something thrilling about every little progression. We may regret the impossibility of having quick access to all the clues already discovered. This may seem anecdotal, but every time you want to return to a letter, you have to go to the right room, open a chest, the bag inside it, and click on the wanted item. This feeling is heightened by the frequency with which you move from one screen to the next, slowly piecing the whole thing together.

As you progress in your understanding of a scene, it becomes clearer who the agents are, what their roles are, their relationships, their motivations, the murder weapon, and so on. But beware: the devil is in the details, and we often need to think beyond the mere “words” available to put in boxes; other objects in the scene will give important clues about the characters and what they’re up to, if you know how to look at them properly.

For those who are really struggling making progress, the developers provide a thoughtful system of hints: the point is to never give the player an answer, but rather to make them ask themselves the right questions, to look at things from an angle they hadn’t yet considered. Superfluous for some, inadequate for others, this system has the merit of helping those most in need without spoiling the player’s experience, and the developers demonstrate a self-confident generosity that fits well with the game as a whole: The Case of the Golden Idol respects its players without ever taking them for fools. If you’re here, it’s because you were the right investigator to understand this great case, so stick with it! Whether you use the clues or not, the satisfaction of solving the crime is there. And that feeling lasts right up until the final word placed in a special box at the very end of the game. Astonishing!

A questionable artistic direction?

It’s finally time to address what at first glance appears to be a problematic issue. It’s impossible not to be struck by the ugliness of the game. But the question immediately arises: to be so ugly, isn’t it necessarily the consequence of a choice? With its few frames of animation, pixel art worthy of the worst point&click, and characters with broken faces, The Case of the Golden Idol doesn’t lure customers with its plasticity, and this will definitely put some of them off. And yet…

                … And yet the magic occurs! Our quest for the golden statuette reveals a surprising alchemy, the result of complete coherence. The graphics of the title are superbly underscored by a soundtrack that creates an increasingly unsettling mood. So, yes, sometimes, after twenty minutes or so on a panel, the musical loop gets a bit hammered. But this remains anecdotal, and we’re almost inclined to think it’s intentional: the music loop replays the animation loops in a chain, drawing the player into its disturbing and burlesque world. The grotesque expressions of the characters, almost reminiscent of Herc’s Adventure on the PSX, the stupidity of some of them, the horse running to the rhythm of an absurd loop in the second panel… The Case of the Golden Idol is definitely funny and weird. But it’s not pointless at all. In fact, the two dimensions mentioned above nourish and enrich each other. The chiasmus that intertwines personal dramas and servant stories with history has nothing to envy in its narrative construction from some of the literary or cinematic greats of the genre. In doing so, the game manages to take a disturbing yet mocking look at power and those who covet it. It’s their ridiculousness, their visible, ridiculous mediocrity, that knocks them off their pedestals. Those who dream themselves into great men in The Case of the Golden Idol are nothing more than mediocre men, like there are plenty of them. The game lifts the veil of maya! Ultimately, it may be this very mediocrity that allows them to soar to these dizzying heights that lies at the core of the game’s anguish.

Once all this is understood, the artistic direction of the software reveals all its charm, taking the player back to the 18th century and giving him the pleasure of reliving an era of video games that he wouldn’t necessarily want to relive.

Conclusion

The Case of the Golden Idol is an undeniable success. The Latvians from Color Gray Games have delivered a first game of great coherence and quality. Never boring or indigestible thanks to its panel-based structure, it has the luxury of being calibrated for short sessions as well as for bingeing. It manages to be both unsettling and burlesque without the one spilling over into the other, and above all, it manages to be deeply engaging and satisfying. Finally, the game is also a successful ode to intelligence and its ability to navigate through disorder to give it form. In fact, this is what is most remarkable about The Case of the Golden Idol: the satisfaction it gives us in the use of our intellect, and the way it illuminates even our perceptive faculties. At the end of each level, we literally see more clearly.

Postscript: In the months following its release, The Case of the Golden Idol was accompanied by two additional contents (each consisting of three panels). To my dismay, I have to admit that I’m a little more reserved about them. Story-wise, these two additional chapters act as a prequel to the original game. Simply put, they explain the dynamics and events that led to the arrival of the magical relic in “England”. Albert Cloudsley and Oberon Geller may not be mere explorers after all… Once again, and perhaps even more so, political relationships are at the core of the game. The duplicity of colonists in a foreign land is finely transcribed and, above all, intelligently used to serve the gameplay. There’s nothing to complain about.
While the mechanics remain the same, the game is much harder than before. Worse, it often feels artificially difficult due to the absurd construction of the scenes. Even with the clues, it can be particularly difficult to see the big picture, making the game feel profoundly unfair at times. However, this was precisely the pitfall that the game managed to avoid so well in its original incarnation. All in all, while the story and situations still hold the player’s attention, solving the puzzles is far more laborious and less enjoyable. Except perhaps for the most expert of the genre…