The Case of the Golden Idol

Really makes you think and deduct the answers for yourself. Great difficulty curve. Starts easy then gradually ramps up

This is a point and click game, however it does not play like an adventure game. This is one of those "detective games", in which you must gather clues in order to piece together what happened. It is also akin to what I've seen being called a "historical detective" game. You look at events in the past (in this game's case, a a temporal 2d diorama) in order to piece together the truth. The game checks the solutions for you and warns you when you're close to the answer (when only 1 or 2 things are wrong), which keeps you from being too frustrated and gives you kind of a clue to how close you are to figuring it out. Which is helpful, as if you've gotten that close to solving the case, you definitely deserve a final hint. That said, this game required some use of pen and paper, personally. There's not a single case that I didn't enjoy cracking, but whether due to the fact that I'm not used to this kind of game, or whether I'm just dumb, it really helped writing things down, as I was able to take note of certain things that the game won't note for you (like keywords and thinking panels, which are essentially smaller chunks of the whole case, like gathering everyone's name for example). By writing things down, I forced myself to really pay attention to EVERYTHING, and if you do pay attention even to the most minute details... you'll be able to solve most cases easily. Miss a spot here and there, and you'll be left at the mercy of the hint system, which can be very, very vague.

A game that makes you think. Sometimes I felt some bits a bit too specific in how you are meant to fill them out. I liked the graphical direction of the game, very unique.

It's the kind of game where you're looking at gorgeous art and poking around and just getting that feeling of being a kid interacting with a pop-up book and lifting the flaps and finding secrets, and there's these cute mysteries, and there's all these threads and sometimes the motivations aren't really clear and you're not really sure exactly what's going on but it's a great time -- and then you deduce, largely by process of elimination, who the final killer must be...and then suddenly the entire design of the thing snaps into focus and the entire plan of the thing crystalizes. I laughed. I might have cried. The closest I can compare it to is Ghost Trick. It's that good. I played it over a long weekend, a page at a time in between some work, and I thoguht it was worth every penny. I hope they make so many more.

Fun and challenging. Similar to Return of the Obra Dinn.