Player Agency and the Utter Lack Thereof
I just don't understand Case of the Golden Idol. I spent a few days playing it, made it to the end, didn't buy the DLC. Just did the main story. And I don't get it. I've never played a game that seemed so uninterested in me as a player in my life. At no point did I ever feel that I had any agency whatsoever, and that's a new feeling from a video game.
If you aren't aware, it's a game often described as being a bit like Return of the Obra Dinn in that you look at scenes and determine, using logic and deductive reasoning and process of elimination and more than a little guesswork, how to fill in the blanks in a notebook which describe them.
It's unlike Return of the Obra Dinn in that Return of the Obra Dinn had you playing as an actual character whose actions meant something. In Case of the Golden Idol, nothing you do means anything. Nothing you do affects anything. Nothing you do changes anything. Your task is not to play as a character in this world. You cannot fail. You cannot succeed. You only fill in the puzzles and move on to the next one. And I've never, ever seen a game do that quite so hard as Case of the Golden Idol.
You can argue, well, in Obra Dinn, you weren't REALLY much of a character. But you were! You were the insurance guy, with a fucking magic watch, and you were trying to provide closure to the families of those who died at sea!
In fucking Mario Picross on SNES, you talk to Mario and Wario after a certain number of stages and they congratulate you, the player, for doing the puzzles! Case of the Golden Idol won't even do that! You're nobody! Nobody congratulates you, because there's no "you" to congratulate!
You start Case of the Golden Idol and everything unfolds in the specific way that it was meant to. That it was always meant to. That it, in fact, already did. You have no influence over things. There are no decisions. As a player, you open the game, view a scene, and then describe it to yourself. Once you've described it accurately, you move on. You're not telling it to someone to illuminate the mystery of the events. Characters in the story know the events. There are witnesses, living people, in just about every scene who can tell you what's going on. But you can't interview them, or ask them. They don't know you're there. They weren't being recorded surreptitiously by someone. They're just existing in the world of Case of the Golden Idol, and you're…
I don't know who you are. I don't know why you're doing this. Any of it. You can't stop what happens. The game just ends, abruptly, in the only way a game about a Golden Idol can end, which I won't spoil in case you haven't finished it yourself and you'd like to.
It left me scratching my head and wondering why the game was so loved. I guess people like puzzle games, and I kind of, do, too, but I felt nothing when Case of the Golden Idol was complete. It's why I didn't buy the DLCs. It's why I won't buy the sequels.
Even fucking Sudoku puzzles can be fun if you're aiming for a record time. Tetris lets you compete against yourself for better scores. You can't keep playing more Case of the Golden Idol puzzles hoping for a faster time or higher score, because each one is so unique to itself that there's no way to redo them.
So I can't compare it to stumbling across a random Sudoku puzzle on the ground which you play and then walk away from. It's not even that. It's more like finding a 10-page short story that has a quiz at the end of every page that makes sure you understood what you've read so far before you can move on to the next page, and then it ends.
I just don't get it. I guess, for some people, the quiz itself is fun enough to make the framing device worthwhile, but the framing device is the heart and soul of a video game to me.
Anyway, that's my take. If you liked the game, awesome! It's well put-together and I'm glad it exists even if I don't understand it or like it and I wish the developers well. There exist many things in this world which are simply not for me. The older I get, the more of them I find, and that's just the way it is.