Absolutely bloody loved The Case of the Golden Idol, a sleuth-y game where you poked about in a series of grim scenes frozen in time and searched about in a range of places, people's pockets, all while making sense of a variety of clues, using deductive processes and clever elimination to figure out who was who, what was going on, and typically, how someone ended up dead. There was an excellent difficulty curve, where things started off straightforward enough, but got more and more rewardingly complex as things went on. The obvious comparison that got made was Return of the Obra Dinn - not just because of the gameplay, but also as its distinctive, grotesque style was not for everyone. This time around, we're looking at far more contemporary settings, and though the style is still recognisable, things are looking much neater!
Another obvious improvement out of the gate is that it's available for every-bleeding-thing right from the off, to the point that if you've an active Netflix subscription you can just fire it up on a mobile device and not need to worry about paying for it. I'm playing it on a Mac! A Mac! Imagine that. Hopefully more people give it a shot as a result.
The basic gameplay is still very much the same - firstly, click about to take in the scene and gather up a bank of words (split into colour-coding groups for names, places, verbs and the like), and then start filling things in. The things are important here, and there's a much wider variety of things you're asked to put together (things). A typical one and a good starting place are with the faces; figure out their names, and then their roles perhaps become a bit clearer, and typically a full written account of events wraps up each chapter. But very quickly you'll start to see a new range of things for you to deduce in between - fill in the blanks of this devious plan, who said what in this press conference, what's the name of the characters in this movie poster that everyone's dressed up as, and so on. We've jumped hundreds of years forward in time for this game to a near-contemporary setting, opening up the range of scenarios but also the range of ways you're asked to make sense of things, and it all feels immediately to its benefit.
Scenarios are handled one at a time but are grouped together into chapters, and there's some nice over-arching sets of conclusions to be made across each of these. I'm only on chapter 2 so far - I had a bit of a headstart as I played all of chapter 1 in the demo - but already I'm finding it to be even more enjoyable than the first, which is saying something.
Another obvious improvement out of the gate is that it's available for every-bleeding-thing right from the off, to the point that if you've an active Netflix subscription you can just fire it up on a mobile device and not need to worry about paying for it. I'm playing it on a Mac! A Mac! Imagine that. Hopefully more people give it a shot as a result.
The basic gameplay is still very much the same - firstly, click about to take in the scene and gather up a bank of words (split into colour-coding groups for names, places, verbs and the like), and then start filling things in. The things are important here, and there's a much wider variety of things you're asked to put together (things). A typical one and a good starting place are with the faces; figure out their names, and then their roles perhaps become a bit clearer, and typically a full written account of events wraps up each chapter. But very quickly you'll start to see a new range of things for you to deduce in between - fill in the blanks of this devious plan, who said what in this press conference, what's the name of the characters in this movie poster that everyone's dressed up as, and so on. We've jumped hundreds of years forward in time for this game to a near-contemporary setting, opening up the range of scenarios but also the range of ways you're asked to make sense of things, and it all feels immediately to its benefit.
Scenarios are handled one at a time but are grouped together into chapters, and there's some nice over-arching sets of conclusions to be made across each of these. I'm only on chapter 2 so far - I had a bit of a headstart as I played all of chapter 1 in the demo - but already I'm finding it to be even more enjoyable than the first, which is saying something.
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