The Case of the Golden Idol (iPhone)
I got myself one of those "Backbone" controllers for my iPhone this week, because I missed using my PS Vita to remote-play games while watching TV (it isn't compatible with PS5) The first-gen Backbone was on a deep discount and fit my phone, and for remote play it works great. In turn this prompted me to see what exciting premium games are available on Apple Arcade.
So I hopped over to Netflix, which has treated me to some excellent narrative games recently, and was pleasantly surprised to see they've added The Case of the Golden Idol. I wasn't all that familiar with it except for a vague memory of its pleasingly grotesque artwork in an Edge "Time Extend" feature a year ago, and that recollection was enough to pique my interest.
It's proven to be a set of inventively structured and ironic murder mysteries. Each case is presented as a set of interconnected tableaux, frozen in time but with maybe a short cycling animation, such as the man in the screenshot above continuing his inexorable descent. Moving between the locales and prodding highlighted points-of-interest reveals clues in dialogue, documents and images hinting at the motive, means, and narrative context of the death(s). To progress to the next case, you must demonstrate your understanding by filling in in the blanks on text "Scroll" using a small directionary of terms also gathered from the environment.
Within this simple structure, the developers Color Gray carefully direct and misdirect the player. Optional Scrolls exist which can be solved to untangle the smaller puzzles which make up the bigger mystery. The text already in each Scroll, and the problems highlighted by the Optional ones, narrow the problem space give a the player a mental scaffolding upon which more challenging solutions can be built.
Conversely, the Scrolls and the dictionaries are written in such a way as to suggest alternative answers which look plausable at first glance but which, on deeper inspection and careful consideration, are deviously constructed red herrings. This is true even where a Scroll seems to be referring to something very specific. A sudden revelation might mean that a sentence relates to entirely different events at an entirely different time, or must involve a character who had previously been written off as an inconsequential conveyer of exposition.
The construction of the puzzles expertly recreates the rhythm of set-up, investigation, suspect, twist, and revelation of great mystery fiction. I boggled at the unexpected circumstances of one character's death, only to then laugh at the irony of it. An important twist about another came to me while I was falling asleep and then, upon waking, I realised how this had been set up - almost too obviously - by earlier dialogue.
The dozen-ish individual cases in this bumper edition link together satisfyingly to tell a story of the hunger for power, buffonery, and intrigue. It's all very colonial British, apparently uncritically at times but with a secret Swiftian edge. A pleasure from start to finish, and notwithstanding a few grammar errors and bugs, a rigorously fair and enthralling challenge.
(So actually I've spent the last week not really using my iPhone controller accessory much at all. Go figure. However it's going to prove very useful on the iPhone versions of Dead Cells and Death's Door, two more great little adventures I'd never quite got around to on console.)
