I was looking back at my "Case Of The Golden Idol" review and I was astounded that it was written in 2023! Anyway, the developers apparently decided to release a new game (not a DLC!) due to popular demand and I immediately bought it to give it a shot. Spoilers ahead!
To be honest, I'm not entirely sure why this game is sold as a separate game, than as a DLC from the original. Maybe there is an engine upgrading issue I am not aware of, and they don't want to risk updating the base game? Either way, the game plays mostly the same way as the first one so that felt a little...disappointing.
And it's not like the story is completely standalone either. I felt that the game had a lot of references to the first game. It REALLY felt like a DLC.
I think how amazed you are with the game depends on how fast you figured things out. Imagine there is a spectrum where one end is players having no clue what's going on, and on the other side you have players who already figured everything out before attempting the puzzles. If a player is at the ends of the spectrum, that's not a good thing. Clueless people will fill frustrated and people who guessed the outcome will feel bored.
I think the designers understand this very well about their game. I think that they did to elevate the previous point is to ensure that each scene is solvable on it's own but make it so that players cannot connect each scene to each other in an obvious way. I felt that this is a direction they consciously took differently from the first game.
For example, Chapter 1 is actually the last chapter, and any hints of that was not shown until at least the last scene in Chapter 5, so when I played the game, I was constantly confused what does any of the scene has to do with Chapter 1. To throw me off more, the scenes in are very loosely connected, especially in chapters 2 to 5. Yes, there are maybe 2 scenes that are connected, but most of them made me go "okay yeah cool but what has this got to do with the bigger picture?". I felt that they overdid that...? Like some scenes really felt like fillers, even after solving them.
Man I wish I could say that this game is a 10/10, but it's probably a 7/10.