Watch out, other video games, because there’s a new GOTY contender in town. At least for my personal taste, that is. The Case of the Golden Idol was my favorite game of 2022 — it’s a short, haunting, supernatural mystery game made up of individual chapters that each felt super satisfying to solve. Its sequel, The Rise of the Golden Idol, is apparently coming out on Nov. 12. It’s coming to a bunch of platforms, including on mobile via Netflix; the announcement trailer also lists PC (via Steam), PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch.
You have a month to catch up on the original game, which is plenty of time, given that it isn’t long (6-8 hours, depending on how fast you are at solving the mysteries). It is, however, a game you will think about forever afterward and wish you could scrub from your memory and play again because it’s so creepy and cool.
Here’s how it works: Each chapter of the game depicts a different crime in progress, as rendered in the strange and unsettling art style of this game. You don’t ever get to see the entire crime play out; you just see the events immediately beforehand, during, or after, depicted in a brief repeating cutscene that’s about the length of a typical animated gif. In that brief animation, you have all the clues you need to understand what happened, and you have a notebook with a series of words you can select to spell out what you think that was. The mysteries start out simple enough, but then they keep on getting stranger, each one stacking upon the next to build out a connective narrative throughline.
Watching this trailer for The Rise of the Golden Idol has me very excited because, at the end of the first game, I had no idea where the story could possibly go next. It seemed like every loose end had been explained and settled. This next game looks similar, but the idol — this time, a stone monkey statue — looks very different, as do the characters and events at hand. So I’m guessing this will be a series of interlocking mysteries in a similar style, telling a different tale about a different mystical object.
If you like mysteries with a supernatural bent, or you like word-based puzzle games like Obra Dinn or Baba Is You, circle back and play Case of the Golden Idol and mark your calendar for its sequel when it drops next month. There’s already a demo out now for The Rise of the Golden Idol that includes a prologue and the first mystery chapter, too.