After playing "Return To Obra Dinn", a few people have asked me to look into "Case of the Golden Idol". It was also recommended by Lucas Pope, developer of Return To Obra Dinn. While waiting for my VISA in Singapore, I managed to allocate some time to play it on stream.

The game is similar to "Return To Obra Dinn" in terms of what they want the player to do; look at scenes and figure out missing blanks in a book that tell the truth of the event. What's different seem to be the design direction that's taken by both developers.

In "Return To Obra Dinn", it seems that the developers took a 'bottom-up design' approach to the game, where the core mechanic of walking around a 3D environment is developed first before the dynamics of a player putting clues together to solve a puzzle. This approach probably gave the developer a lot of higher level design restrictions like what kind of story can be told, how clues can be dropped and how the story would need to flow for the game to make sense.

It also restrcits the kind of the quality of life that a developer can implement for the player. In both games, the player's goal is simply to rewatch scenes and fill in blanks. In "Return To Obra Dinn", they could easily implement some kind of a teleport feature so that players can easily view scenes without traversing the ship, but that would break the core mechanic (and thus all the important game dynamics) of the game.

In "Case of the Golden Idol", it felt like the developers took a 'top-down design' approach to the game, where the developers probably have an idea of what kind of story to tell and what the player has to do first before filling in the rest of the game. Looking for clues and solving the puzzle felt extremely smooth, unlike "Return To Obra Dinn". What it lacks is the opposite; immersion. The player's role is simply that of an omnipotent reader who is being lead by the developers.

Because of these thoughts, I don't really have much issues about the way "Case of the Golden Idol" is made. I appreciate the format they went for and I think they executed it beautifully. There were many instances when I went "Ohhhh?!" and "I see?!", and even more times when my mind was blown while guessing the possible answers.

There are a few small nitpicks I have, however. At some points, it felt like a very interactive...close-ended(?) English comprehension paper. Maybe that's not exactly a bad thing, because they made it fun in a 'carades' kind of way. When I was lost, plucking in random words to form ridiculous sentences and trying to make sense of it was really funny.

So I guess that nitpick was not really an issue after all.

In conclusion, a 8/10 game, would highly recommend especially if there's a discount. I would still rank "Return To Obra Dinn" much higher.