I finally played the full game of The Case of the Golden Idol as well as the Spider of Lanka DLC. Mostly I still feel my pre-release feedback based on three of the early cases is valid, but there is something in the full game that makes it more than the sum of its parts.
The investigation part is not any more interesting in the full game. It is still a totally mechanical and unengaging process that you have to go through to get all the words and panels. It’s also still very rare for any of those clues to be intrinsically rewarding, since the writing is nothing special. I especially don’t like using this system for finding verbs from random places, nor the repeated gimmick the game has for getting words from one context and meaning from the clues but then applying them totally differently in the solution. It feels very gamey.
The “fill in the blanks” deduction part is kind of odd. The mechanism of letting the player know when they have 1-2 wrong answers makes brute-forcing way too easy. When you have most of one of the panels correct (and there’s usually so many gimmes that you basically always get tot the 1-2 mistakes range on a first guess), it makes it too easy to triangulate the remaining answers. The obvious solution to the problem is to “just not do that, then”, but it’s very easy to extract information out of the game just by accident, not by intentional brute-forcing. I think I might want a separate “check solution” button that needs to be clicked every time you want to give a verdict, so that I can fill in my best guess at the solution, mull it over and possibly change it before asking for a verdict. (And that in turn would make it possible to e.g. track whether you solved the game perfectly or resorted to guessing, which would make the deduction part more tense.)
Likewise the solution templates are constantly leaking parts of the solution where I don’t think it was intended. For example, on the last case of the Spider of Lanka the identity of the Spider should obviously have been deduced by mapping the text descriptions to the environmental storytelling, like a one guy being too heavy to take the rope lift. But none of that was necessary, because the template text made it clear that it was the Spider who invited the son into the gambling game and we already knew that was Oberon.
But in the end these games succeed or fail by the writing and the cases, not by the systems.
There’s not a ton of writing in the game, and it’s pretty plain. But it is better than the writing tends to be in the most obvious comparison, the cardgame format detective boardgames which have similar amounts of text and often a similar dependence on e.g. images as Golden Idol has.
In terms of plot, the early cases in Golden Idol are pretty one dimensional. They’ll hinge on something like “I just need to establish which of these two characters is the doctor; one of them has a scalpel in their inventory”. The later ones can have more reliance on implicit clues, like the relative positions of objects in the scene. That’s where the game tends to be at its most satisfying, though it’s not going to be that many of those.
For me the star of the show is the way the cases are linked together into a larger story. The way you learn more about the world (e.g. the idol, the brotherhood) across the cases and in fact need to learn about them and carry that information across the cases is great. Combined with a lot of the cases being very satisfyingly outlandish, it makes for kind of compelling storytelling despite the actual writing being so barebones.
I don’t know… I had a good time with the game, and definitely learned something new about what can make these games tick. But I’m quite puzzled at how universally loved it seems to be and how much press it got.
