Just finished The Case of the Golden Idol and it's the best game I've played in years. It's an investigation/deduction type game in the vein of Return to Obra Dinn, but in my opinion even better. There are 11 cases and they're all fucking great and interconnected, with an overarching story that's very cool. My playtime was around 8 hours and I didn't use any hints.
Took me completely by surprise. If you're even remotely interested in this type of game, you should get it asap. Best money I spent all year.
Just finished this myself. I somewhat disagree with your assessment.
It's good - just not Obra Dinn-good.
The artstyle is a bit off, but otherwise sets a good tone.
Audio is negligible - nothing of value is lost if it's played muted.
The story it weaves is a good one, but it just doesn't have the same strength to it - it's too loose.
On the gameplay front, Golden Idol fails on two points where Obra Dinn succeeded.
First there's consistency. Obra Dinn takes place in 11 points in time, but they're all in the same spot, the ship itself. And your task is always the same, identify everyone, discover their fates. Golden Idol has ~12 points in time, of which some only share the same space, at best. Worse than that, the tasklist changes after the first half of the game. It starts out with three tasks; spell out the plot, identify all the characters involved, and then a third variable task. But quickly the third task splits into two tasks, and then again, and then the other tasks change and the next you know you're trying to determine a society's hierarchy by their uniforms, calculating how many merit points people lost for not toeing the party line, and then finally you're skipping wildly across the countryside trying to piece together three plotlines at once!
Secondly there's the gameplay focus. Obra Dinn had gameplay, but it took a back seat to allow the player to observe, contemplate and deduce things. At no point did I feel that Obra Dinn obstructed me. Golden Idol, on the other hand, has pixel-hunting. Each scene is set up with a series of hot-spots, where more clues can be learned. The option is provided to make them visible or invisible. If you have them visible, then it won't take long for each chapter to degrade into a flurry of clicks to scoop up all the clues, before then sitting down and sifting through them. But if you have them invisible you're gonna waste time trying to find all the hot-spots. It's both artificial padding and a specific game design decision - and one I think didn't work out as well as Obra Dinn did. And Golden Idol's decision to go with sentence gaps that you just slide words into - it quickly loses its appeal. I got stuck for far too long on one chapter because I knew exactly what I was trying to convey, but the game wouldn't accept any iterations of it.
There's a free demo of it that has the first four chapters, and those four chapters are really sweet. But that sweet feeling only sticks around for the next two chapters IMO.
If Obra Dinn is a 9/10, then Golden Idol is a 7.5/10 - currently they're asking $15 for this, but I don't reckon it's worth that. Stick it on a wishlist instead and see if you can't get it for <$10.
