The Rise of the Golden Idol sets the standard for point-and-click mysteries

It’s the 1970s, and The Case of the Golden Idol is ancient history. What was the stuff of legends and myth — Lemurian history — in The Case of the Golden Idol is almost entirely unknowable, told in the shadows by the weirdest of conspiracy theorists and fringe historians. Anything that was known about the golden idol and its powers broke alongside it at the end of The Case of the Golden Idol. The Rise of the Golden Idol kicks off with a scientist face down, dead in the snow; the cycle begins anew. “The world has changed dramatically,” Color Gray Games wrote in its description of the sequel. “The sins of humanity have not.”

At the outset of Rise, there’s no immediate mention of the idol or the role it may play, but several people — mostly unhoused people and one prestigious scientist — have been found dead from various causes, all with glowing red eyes. Like in The Case of the Golden Idol, the first order of business in The Rise of the Golden Idol is to start piecing together clues built into the game’s scenes. While in The Case of the Golden Idol these scenes were static and made with pixel art, Color Gray Games’ team has advanced the art alongside the centuries: Scenes are still largely static, albeit with some looping animation on certain details, but now rendered in a grotesque art style that’s reminiscent of Arlene Klasky and Gábor Csupó’s Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, The Wild Thornberrys, or As Told by Ginger instead of classic video games.

Each of the scenes depicts a crucial moment in the complex story. Such a scene might be, perhaps, two shadowy figures in a darkened museum attic — one electrocuting the other. Or, maybe, it’s a press conference at a police station, or a woman watching a man dance on TV. The Rise of the Golden Idol is a point-and-click mystery, so the player should expect to do a lot of pointing and clicking: first, on highlighted areas that warrant investigation to unlock keywords, then in moving those keywords into fill-in-the-blanks-style journal entries to identify characters or key elements.

At its core, The Rise of the Golden Idol has the same gameplay from The Case of the Golden Idol, but with a few quality-of-life improvements, the biggest of which is that players no longer have to switch between the scenes and the fill-in-the-blanks notebook page. Instead, the solvable entries pop up right on the scene itself, as if it were a desktop window. They move around, meaning it’s easy to investigate each scene while filling out the empty slots. To put it simply, The Rise of the Golden Idol puts both the “exploring” and “thinking” phases onto one screen. Between each scene, the detective flashes back to a chapter hub that requires a filled-out summary note before moving on; it’s a way to ensure the player really understands what’s going on in the increasingly complicated story. It’s very easy to get knotted up in The Rise of the Golden Idol’s small details, so the recap of sorts between each scene — which still adds puzzle elements to solve — is a helpful change that encourages players to better appreciate and interrogate the overarching storyline.

Although that storyline only calls back to one or two characters from the original game, it’s still a reflection of The Case of the Golden Idol’s themes of greed, power, and corruption while nailing the grisly humor for which the original is beloved. The Rise of the Golden Idol’s characters’ understanding of the idol and its usage are muddied — really, really muddied — by the centuries that have passed; the gruesome accidents and murders are all largely caused by both well-meaning dumbasses and power-hungry idiots. A lot of the storylines, which really are elaborate jokes, hone in on this. A favorite is when an absolute fool of a science intern sets himself on fire using a contraption powered by the idol; he had his laboratory access revoked after he used the machine in an unauthorized test. He later “learned” about the idol’s powers from a cultist group full of conspiracy theorists, and was convinced his lab access was revoked because the machine was set to give feelings of hatred to his boss. His second attempt was aimed at taking away that hatred — instead, it started a fire. This is one of the early pushes in a Rube Goldberg machine of bad decisions that powers a throughline of ineptitude. The incompetence of man continues to be rewarded. (Sound familiar?)

The Rise of the Golden Idol’s only real issue is a lack of precision with language; it’s very easy to understand a scenario, but still get the answer wrong due to minor variations in interpretation. There are a few instances where wrong solutions made perfect sense, but were not the correct solutions; in these cases, the clues didn’t help at all, because there’s no real way for the developers, who wrote the hints, to know exactly what’s causing the issue. They’re just guesses at what could be confusing a player. A more helpful system would, perhaps, be a last-ditch hint that highlights where an answer is incorrect. Like in The Case of the Golden Idol, though, it’s clear that Color Gray Games would prefer the player figure out the solutions without any hints at all, even if it takes too long to get there. You can see this in the hints popup, where the game asks if you want to meditate — breathe in and out to a circle expanding and contracting, like a mental health app — on the answer. That is, indeed, the most satisfying way to solve a mystery, but it also risks turning a frustrated player off entirely.

These frustrations are minor, though, if you can push through the few vague puzzle solutions. Like The Case of the Golden Idol before it, The Rise of the Golden Idol is an essential mystery thriller that somehow pulls together a web of red string into a cogent, silly, and masterful narrative.

The Rise of the Golden Idol will be released Nov. 12 on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on Windows PC via Steam using a pre-release download code provided by publisher Playstack. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.