Has there ever been a good detective game since the 90s? Yes, but so many made the transition to 3D, it became sort of limited or difficult to capture the thrill of looking into true crime cases. This game series is nothing like that. It's also mentally taxing, but you learn useful things.
I have not played the prior game, which funny enough, takes place 200 years before this. Rise of the Golden Idol is, what I'm assuming, is all the grand cult conspiracies from the prior game, coming back to a contemporary setting. But still provides the thrill of the chase through slow, arduous yet scrutinizing cases, evidence, and items of interests to stop the greater evil.
This is a challenging brain puzzler, especially if you're into crosswords or something like scramble. But the important task is to find words, connect them to personalities, and fill in the blanks for the written context given. Getting them right leads you further into the depths of its madness.
So, our story starts after the Golden Idol from Monkey Paw Island that resulted in a series of deaths for the Cloudsley family, have vanished or gotten into the wrong hands. Yeah, spooky forbidden powers and cult organizations creating another thread of unfortunate events to follow.
It's the 1970s, it all started when a patient from an asylum escaped his straps, and killed a guard before escaping. What unfolds later is a series of murders, I'm assuming from a chronological order of events. A lot of the cases presented are animated to capture the essence and emotions of the situation. With these '?' '!' that presents points of interests.
And within each interests, like say a dead body, you'll have various objects to interact giving keywords. There's a lot more, like the ice on the stairs he slipped on, but looking at it closer, it seems like he fell from the bridge. No obvious giveaways.
A lot of thinking skills is involved, this one is a no-brainer, but sort of like a post-tutorial phase that is warming up for the real stuff. Multiple incidents of accidents, and then dead bodies were found. Another where the office of a police commissioner was looted and photos disposed of. All this connects to a curse, that have killed multiple seemingly misplaced in these crimes.
Or were they? The mystery needing to be solved in the greater scheme of things reveals how not all of it is connected, but tapping into the zeitgeist of modern society. I also have to admit just how good of a job it did, reenacting crimes of passion in the mid 70s. Where urban crimes went amok. As well as the information given from an educational standpoint, how human society is easily malleable, how poorly regulated laws leave openings, and well, your usual religious fanatics.
It's a simple design, made to tackle a variety of issues, all the words acquired after searching for the box, then is inserted into these filings, like vehicle owners, person of interest, decoding messages, and deciphering these eventually lead to summarizing the event.
All of these are important, each scene for every chapter provides key information needed to clue together, and eventually lead to where the Golden Idol is. I mean, you read the news once in a while, it's interesting how this game manages to capture even criminal behaviors, the way they talk, most of the time I scrutinize these to help me get closer to solving all of it.
God forbid, realism is supposed to be important for immersion. I'm fine with an indicator that tells me whether I have one or two answers wrong and that I've managed to get everything right. It's this dopamine effect that hits so well. Let me know I'm doing great.
But yeah, it's not for the faintest of hearts either, you'll be seeing a number of grizzly details, some based on real life events, others well exaggerated based on them, to the extent of even being unnerving. I mean, I play plenty of video games, but even the things some of the perpetrators do here on a holy mackerel level of screwed up. Did I mention religious fanatics?
If things do get hard, there's the tip that well, takes me to a breathing exercise and ask me specific questions, suggestions, and obvious places to look at. Very useful stuff, but I like to flex my intellect sometimes by pretending it don't exist. It's probably too helpful.
There's plenty to go off, with an engaging story and puzzles, interesting music score, I feel smarter already. Also, damn, not the right time to let weird conspiracies get in my head now.
