Announcement details make The Case of the Golden Idol

Written by Jack Allin — September 18, 2021 at 10:17

Rather than having great detectives solve impossible cases without much player involvement beyond steering them around, recently there's been an increased trend toward deductive reasoning as we're challenged to solve complex whodunits entirely on our own. This will be the case once again in two-man indie developer Color Gray Games' upcoming historical murder mystery The Case of the Golden Idol.

Set in the 18th century, this "wryly amusing detective game" centers around a series of mysterious deaths. In order to reconstruct events with "very little hand-holding" involved, you must "gather verbal evidence and visual clues, then apply your deduction skills to figure out what actually happened and how each victim died." Although the deaths are seemingly unrelated at first, piecing them all together gradually reveals a larger narrative that "connects all the individual tales" in unexpected ways.

Inspired by Lucas Pope's acclaimed Return of the Obra Dinn, the Latvian brother duo behind The Case of the Golden Idol seek to offer a "true experience of what it must really be like to be a detective." Combining early-nineties pixel art with late-nineties cinematic cutscenes, the game tasks players with manipulating the clues collected via a "unique drag-and-drop evidence mechanic." Investigating each scenario becomes an iterative process of forming hypotheses, testing them and then updating them when new evidence comes to light until the final solution is identified.

While the full version of The Case of the Golden Idol is "coming soon" on Steam for Windows PC, the upcoming Steam Next Fest will provide a limited-time sneak peek with a demo available from October 1st to 7th.