Review: Rise of the Golden Idol
(This review will have spoilers for Case of the Golden Idol)
Rise of the Golden Idol is a game that I wanted to like a lot more than I actually did. Case of the Golden Idol, the original, is one of my favorite detective games, and I had very high hopes for Rise coming in - and for the most part, I'm pleased to say it meets them. The grody pixel art was certainly a distinct look, but the new "painted" art is definitely a step up, and the soundtrack is a big improvement (in the sense that I noticed that it had music at all). Even the gameplay has been refined a bit, but we'll get to that in a second - the bottom line is that Rise is more Golden Idol, for better or worse, and I'm happy to play as many of these games that they want to put out.
Aside from the obvious aesthetic change, Rise essentially brings two new things to the table. First, some basic gameplay improvements: you automatically get all the words associated with an investigation point when you click on it, and they've been color-coded in a more consistent manner. Names are red, verbs are blue, etc, which helps a lot when trying to parse a block of script that's like "[Red][Red][Blue][Red][Red] so they could [Blue][Yellow] and [Blue][Red][Red]'s [Yellow]." The thinking panels have also been separated so you can pull them all up individually and move them around so that you can see them at the same time as the actual crime scene. I personally found this very finnicky and not very helpful, but maybe it works for you.
The other major change in Rise is that every chapter is now its own little meta-puzzle. Each of the game's five chapters is broken up into three or four cases each, and upon solving each case, you unlock a chunk of information for that particular chapter's puzzle board. These are probably my favorite new feature, and come in a variety of interesting formats: some are just glorified thinking panels, but one takes the form of a conspiracy-style corkboard, and in another you have to put together what the corporate structure of a company is. It's a good way for the game to check that you're actually following along with the plot, although it does occasionally feel like "why does this matter?"
And that feeling kind of permeates the entire game. Rise attempts both a more low-key mystery than Case, and one that takes a very long time to actually show its hand. The story feels very meandering, and even as late as Chapter 4, it wasn't particularly clear as to what the game was actually building to. This is a structure that can work, but it's not helped by the fact that several of the midgame cases feel like filler. For as far as it actually matters to the plot, Chapter 2 could have easily been cut down from four cases to two, and at least one of Chapter 4's cases could have been given the axe. That isn't to say that those cases are bad or not fun to solve, they are! But the case count jumps from 11 to 20, and from a pacing perspective, Case was clearly doing more with less.
This goes double for the overarching plot. Case has a very strong central mystery, bringing you along on the journey from "Oh Edmond stole the idol and is researching what it can do," to "Who the fuck is this Lazarus guy?" and "Oh shit, the Order Party is using the idol to rule over England Albion." Every case advances the plot and you get to see both the ascent and downfall of its main villain. By comparison, Rise kind of stalls out in the midgame and doesn't really find its footing again until Chapter 5 starts bringing everything together. The game has multiple major villains, but they often spend more time sabotaging each other than actually advancing any of their schemes, and we definitely figured out who the real final villain was before the game expected us to. It is, in many ways, a farce - to steal a friend's metaphor, the difference between Knives Out and Glass Onion, and I would be lying if I said that I didn't vastly prefer the former.
None of this is to suggest that Rise is a bad game, to be clear. Even with my complaints about the style of mystery, I would still give it an 8/10 or so, it's just being compared to Case's 9 or 9.5. I'm absolutely looking forward to the DLC, and I hope that by going back to that sort of smaller, self-contained story structure, they can recapture some of the magic of the original game. What's here is a really good foundation! Whether or not they can successfully build on it, we'll see.