I'm finally playing the Golden Idol case and it should spawn its own genre

You could Call The Case of the Golden Idol a point-and-click adventure. It wouldn't adequately describe what happens in this game, but you could call it that. It Is a game where you Point on objects and click on them to gather information, but that's pretty reductionist. The truth is that it's like no other point-and-click game I've ever played, and I'm annoyed that it took me so long to get around to it. But hey, at least I had fun before the sequel, The Rise of the Golden Idol, comes out later this year.

The unsolved case of the golden idol

I first heard a lot of excitement about The Case of the Golden Idol when it came out in October 2022. I didn't know much about it, but it was one of those indie games that sparked those tweets: “Be sure to make time for this before making your GOTY list.” I didn't make time because I didn't have any. I tried to finish God of War Ragnarok, Pentiment, and a bunch of other games and made the wrong decision 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 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 game I've played since 2018's Unavowed that feels like it's doing something entirely new with the genre. That supernatural adventure from Wadjet Eye Games used 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 daring structurally, throwing out a lot of what we traditionally associate with point-and-click adventure games, but maintaining an aesthetic that would fit perfectly with '90s classics like Day of the Tentacle.

A new take on point-and-click mechanics

The biggest difference from the classics of the genre is that you can't move. In fact, you don't even control a character on the screen. Instead, you're a disembodied observer, walking through tableaux frozen at a specific moment in time.

The game builds this dynamic early on. The prologue scenario takes you to a moment that can obviously only last a split second, when one man has pushed another off a cliff into the ocean below. At the start of the scenario, he's still hanging in mid-air, and will continue to float there as long as you're still looking for clues. Since the men remain frozen as if in amber, you can search them to see what they're carrying, and search the nearby campsite to see what's in their backpacks. In each, you'll find clues that add words and names to a list you'll eventually use to use MadLibs to piece together a hypothesis about what happened at the crime scene.

It's a lot like Return of the Obra Dinn, but instead of exploring a boat in first person, you switch from one viewpoint to another, like a kid peeping into a dollhouse. It's utterly unique, but also seems endlessly replicable to me. The Case of the Golden Idol is set over four decades in the 19th century, but there's no reason you couldn't apply that formula to a cyberpunk city, a remote ancient Greek island, a modern state fair, 1920s Paris, a college town deli, or a high fantasy library. In fact, The Rise of the Golden Idol is designed to transport players to the 1970s. The format is so flexible, yet has incredibly specific mechanics, that it feels like it could spawn its own genre. The good thing about coming so late to the party is that the developers who took inspiration from it had a two-year head start on those games. Lucky me.