Well, hello there, sequel to excellent detective game, The Case Of The Golden Idol, didn’t expect to see you here. Announced during the pre-show of tonight’s Game Awards, The Rise Of The Golden Idol exists as little more than a brief teaser trailer right now, but to be honest, I’m sold already. Sign me up, please.
As you can see from the trailer above, The Rise Of The Golden Idol has quite a different art style compared to the distinctive pixel art seen in Case, but given the teaser was prefaced by the Tuuuu-duunnnnnhhh of a Netflix logo, I suspect that’s probably because it’s been made with mobile devices in mind first – and we all know detailed pixel art doesn’t play quite so well with phones, does it?
Whether that means The Rise Of The Golden Idol will still feature Case’s ‘fill in the blanks’ puzzle scrolls remains to be seen, but hopefully dragging and dropping clues and words with touch controls shouldn’t be too much of a stretch to carry over to the sequel.
Looking more closely at its Steam page, there is still come connective tissue between the two games. Set 300 years after the events of Case in the 1970s, the legend of the Golden Idol has become little more than an “obscene myth”. Clearly, though, it won’t stay that way for long, as you’ll play a “tenacious hunter” on a quest to unearth it once again. There are 15 cases this time around, too, and you’ll need to “make sense of a grand mystery that unravels across an age of hallucinogens, fax machines, parapsychology and TV guides.”
Yes please and thank you, Color Gray Games, and here’s hoping that in its transition to other platforms, Rise doesn’t lose too much of what made Case so fantastic. It’s coming to Steam and consoles in 2024, and I’ll be keeping a close eye on it in the months to come.
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