Cold Gold Case

Why even have an in-game notebook with such incomplete notes?

Last year, I was intrigued by Return of the Obra Dinn's mystery, but didn't solve much of it because of the frustratingly unhelpful in-game notebook.

The Case of the Golden Idol is mechanically similar: exploring a crime scene unlocks words, and you fill those words into Mad Libs-like forms - attach names to faces, develop the context of relevant evidence, reconstruct a sequence of events - to solve that scene. The vital difference is that Golden Idol's cases are small; an individual case's virtual "notebook" is only a couple of pages, so it doesn't take much effort to re-scan the evidence and connect all of its dots.

Still, by the end of its free demo, Golden Idol was starting to ask for a "solve" that didn't seem solve-able by deductive reasoning; an answer I had to guess and check and guess again for. You know, adventure game bullshit.

And unfortunately, The Rise of the Golden Idol - its brand-new sequel - looks like it may embrace that guessing-game angle even more. Where the first game's cases were clearly building up a bigger mystery (about the titular Idol) in the background -- the demo for "Rise" was already starting to include its own over-arching plot in individual case solutions, making logical leaps in individual scenes feel premature.

While I like the small, self-contained crime puzzles in the early parts of these games, I'm not exactly eager to sign up for their bigger mysteries which seem to sacrifice playability for the sake of drama.

Progress: Finished both demos.