When you manage to release a cult classic, there’s always that worry on how you follow it up.

Case of the Golden Idol was one of the most interesting and enjoyable indies in the space when it released in 2022. It’s a simple premise, but one that stood out for being different and suitably challenging.

Your goal is to figure out what each scene is telling you by dragging and dropping words into blank spaces, then determining how it all affects the wider story across chapters. It’s all part of one wider, connected mystery that reaches a satisfying enough epilogue but one that leaves you wanting more.

In comes Rise of the Golden Idol, then, which is bigger with 20 cases, and comes with an updated art style and improved UI, set in the more modern day compared to the 18th Century, and as such, a whole new host of characters. But largely, the game remains exactly the same.

On the one hand, that might seem a brave, bold move, but it is a smart one. It’s more of the same, not trying to reinvent the wheel and focusing more on the storytelling aspect while providing some new ways to approach puzzle solving.

Players who dived into the original will feel right at home here, with the game starting out simply with a Prison Break and you having to name two characters featured, one strangling the other. And it’s up to you to work out who, why and how this all happened by searching the scene closely for key words, clicking little glints on screen.

Often you’ll work out character names by looking at name tags or finding documents and letters addressed to them, maybe someone will even call out a person’s name. But sometimes you’ll need to work things out through process of elimination and a little bit of brute force. It’s very much in the vain of Return of the Obra Dinn in that sense.

And gradually the difficulty will increase as you move from scene to scene, with more things for players to solve (some optionally) – You’ll always need to work out the events of each scene, but sometimes to do that you’ll need to work out other puzzles, like character identities, work-shift patterns, victim identities, and even what’s being discussed at a press conference.

This will all sound familiar if you’ve played Case of the Golden Idol, for sure, but where Rise takes things up a notch is by really syncing its chapters together and making sure all of the scenes tie together. So before you progress to the next chapter, you’ll need to work out how all the scenes come together, telling the wider story, and then how it will naturally segueway you into the following chapter.

And of course, that will also get harder and harder as you progress through the chapters, tasking you with further puzzles like hierachy charts.

Rise beautifully handles and manages its difficulty curve. Every scene feels like a noticeable step up from the previous but it’s also very generous in how it onboards players, giving them enough to sink their teeth into before it really starts ramping up the difficulty. By then, it’s too late. You’re invested and the game has its hooks into you.

And here’s the kicker – it also refuses to give away its answers freely as the previous game did. Instead, you’ll get a series of key questions asked around each scene and answers with staggered hints and riddles to get you thinking about the problem rather than outright telling you how to solve it. There’s even a delayed reaction between you clicking the button for a hint and getting the answer, almost as if the game is giving you a chance to back out before it reveals its secrets.

But that’s ok, because when you do solve puzzles in Rise and you finally fill in that form or a clue suddenly makes sense to you, hiding the smile is incredibly difficult. It’s exactly the same vibe I got from Case and it’s just as prominent here. Only moreso, because once you come away from a Chapter, you realise that these aren’t just random scenes, there’s actually a purpose to everything and connecting the wider story together feels super satisfying.

And when you start connecting chapters together, it’s like coming out of a Christopher Nolan movie after those final thirty minutes are up and your mind has just been blown.

Rise is a super smart game and while there were concerns about the setting moving to modern day, I’m here to tell you it makes things a lot more interesting, offering up some fun and creative puzzles more deeply rooted in science and technology. It explores more modern day themes and makes the game more relatable in other ways.

And visually the upgrade really works, giving off some Disco Elysium vibes with characters getting more expressions in their reactions and more animations in their movements. They’re a lot more expressive now and reading their visual cues is just as important as it is to see what they’re carrying around on their person. Observing what they’re doing, who they’re associating with, and getting in closeups on their scenes will really help you determine next steps forward.

There’s even one scene where you can view it during night and day, and the use of lighting and colouring in both sequences is really expertly done, with you being able to see the characters sat in a row by day, but then having to work them out from shapes, shadows and silhouettes by night. Rise’s new visual style really feeds into the puzzle solving too.

The thing that I am a bit on the fence with is the UI. For a few different reasons. Firstly, I started out playing this game on my ROG Ally as this feels like a cozy handheld game I wanted to snuggle up with under the covers. And after a few cases, I had to switch to my laptop. I really struggled getting to grips with console controls playing Rise and when I tried to use touch screen to mitigate, it got even harder between the navigation and the text being pretty small to read at times.

I also struggled trying to organise the boxes across the screen, especially in later chapters where you feel like you need to bounce between scenes more and want to have multiple things open to cross-reference. It started getting really cluttered there and as such boxes start overlapping, you run out of room on screen so you have to start closing things. And you have to click multiple times in order to close all of those boxes and get back to the action.

A lot of this is easily solved by using the mouse and while I haven’t tried Rise on Xbox or PS, based on my experience, if you have the option, I’d stick with PC. I don’t doubt for a moment this will become better optimised for Steam Deck and other handhelds, but the build I played for review definitely got a bit hectic in later chapters with all the moving around you end up doing. I do feel like some better document organisation would benefit the game drastically.

You can also make the argument that the game doesn’t really get too creative with its offerings late on and once you’ve seen its early tricks – especially if you’ve already played Case, and you should – the flow and patterns become pretty apparent and at times, can feel like you’re going through the motions a bit, especially with semantics around certain word usage.

But Rise is a better game than Case of the Golden Idol, for my money. It was a mostly enjoyable experience from beginning to end, the way it links and brings everything together is delightful. And it was so refreshing being encouraged to look back at previous chapters and find hints that may not have seemed important before but suddenly became incredibly relevant to later puzzles. Those eureka moments are not commonly found in games too much anymore and were very welcome here.

It’s been an interesting year for games – some heavy hitters didn’t deliver the way we thought they would. Some didn’t make their launch windows and some came out of nowhere and became overnight sensations. Rise of the Golden Idol is poised to make some headlines before the year is out and really take this franchise to the next level, exactly what Color Gray and Playstack deserve.

Verdict

Rise of the Golden Idol is a smart sequel that doesn’t massively reinvent what the brilliant Case of the Golden Idol did but adds some smart new additions, updates the visual style and UI, and makes its storytelling more cohesive with a well paced difficulty curve. While the UI can get a bit cluttered and disruptive with questionable controller navigation and the game can get bogged down in semantics and its mechanics, it’s one of the most enjoyable, entertaining narrative experiences I’ve had in some time and a series you absolutely must make the time to check out!

Pros

+ Distinct, intriguing art upgrade for the series across all its scenes
+ Flicking back between scenes and linking chapter stories is incredibly satisfying
+ Really interesting narrative with some great deductions and is easy to dip in and out of.
+ Hint system that doesn’t give too much away with a gradual, well paced difficulty curve