I’m obsessed with detective games–the grisly crime scenes, the joining of the dots, the thrill of feeling like a smartass savant while everyone else wonders what the hell happened. An excess of watching true crime documentaries and criminal psychology YouTube channels (yes, yes, I know many of them are pop-psychology hacks) have tapped into my inner detective and left me acting out my sleuthing fantasies through the safety of a computer screen.
But detective games often flatter to deceive. Having playedL.A. Noirerecently, it wasn’t long before I realised that my seemingly brilliant deductions didn’t really have any impact on the story. I was just going through the motions.Disco Elysiumis a great, great game, and while I’d argue it’s one of the most compelling deep-dives into the lonely tormented psyche of the detective in all fiction, it’s very much an RPG wrapped around a detective story rather than a game that attempts to seriously convert the detective’s process into mechanics.
In recent years, it was Lucas Pope’sReturn of the Obra Dinnthat really embodied that process of investigating crime scenes and figuring out on your lonesome what the hell happened. Now, The Curse of the Golden Idol follows up on that premise of letting you explore little vignettes in which terrible things occur, then putting names to faces and causes of death to bodies. With its 90s point-and-click presentation as opposed to Obra Dinn’s 1-bit first-person fusion, Golden Idol is very much its own thing, but those same deductive principles are there, with the same strengths (and the same few shortcomings).
The game follows the journey of the titular idol in the 18th century, as it makes its way from the hands of colonial explorers to avaricious aristocrats, with death and murder following close behind. You are a disembodied detective, though really it’s impossible to tellwhoyou actually are as the game is shamelessly free from story context and introductory niceties. You’re thrown straight into a kind of point-and-click adventure scene, mere moments after a death has occurred (and well before an actual investigator would actually arrive on the scene); dithered pixelated faces on oversized heads gape in horror, a body floats in the water, and the scene awaits your investigation.
ALSO READ:Deus Ex: Mankind Divided’s Ending Works, Actually
While you’re free to switch between the ‘Exploring’ and ‘Thinking’ views any time you like, I tend to split my investigation into two phases. First, I scour the scene for all the clues. The game helps you out a bit here by letting you see the amount of clues you’ve found so far against the total number to find in a scene, but you’re able to bolster the challenge (and the deductive detective fantasy) for yourself by choosing to play without the little ‘glimmers’ that basically tell you where most of the clues are, which takes away a big part of the game’s allure of uncovering things for yourself.
Then there’s the deductive or ‘Thinking’ screen, where–Obra Dinn-style–you need to identify every character in the scene and fill in the blanks to say how the depicted death transpired. Each scene will also have its own ‘bespoke’ deduction puzzle to complete, which may be to figure out who sat where at a table where someone was poisoned, or to fill out the names of everyone on the scorecard of a card game in a tavern.
What’s beautiful about Golden Idol (apart from the gorgeously ugly character art, that is) is the way the pieces fall into place. It’s that same investigative frisson you get with Obra Dinn; you establish the scene, you figure some bits out, but then there’s thatone elusive piece of the puzzle missing. You retread all the rooms again, you reassess the scene, and you may be stuck in this loop for a good several minutes. Then, suddenly,BAM, epiphany strikes, as you realise that perhaps the murdered is deliberately trying to fool you, or that a certain letter on a seemingly innocent character is actually encoded, revealing the identity of both the murderer and the patsy in one fell swoop.
But just like Obra Dinn, Golden Idol demands some good faith from the player, and a willingness to not exploit certain conveniences that the game lays out for you to keep things progressing. As pointed out earlier, you can remove that little hint glimmer, but beyond that the game has another hint system that you can’t get rid of, which tells you when you have just one or two deductions left to crack that part of the case.
As with Obra Dinn’s name cards, you can at this point just swap names and words in and out until you land on the right answer. Do yourself a favour andresist, because otherwise the detective fantasy disintegrates, as you suddenly became all too aware of the non-diegetic force covertly aiding you in your investigation. I admit that I had to resort to doing this once or twice, but to make that bitter pill easier to swallow I’d then stay in the scene to work my way back and attempt to figure out what critical details I missed. In my defence, there was one occasion where the information was pretty unclear, but overall these backwards deductions were great at revealing the shortcomings of my investigative process, making me more diligent for the next scene.
Neither Golden Idol nor Obra Dinn are ‘pure’ detective games, but they would both risk not being as fun if they were. Instead, they tap into the detective fantasy, nudging you towards the correct conclusions in clever but subtle ways while still leaving the bulk of the investigation in your hands. Even the great Sherlock Holmes had his Watson; it’s just that here your Watson is the game itself.
