The Rise of the Golden Idol gets a November release date and looks great

Watch out, other video games, because there’s a new GOTY contender in town. At least for my personal taste, that is. The Case of the Golden Idol was my favorite game of 2022 – it’s a short, gripping, supernatural mystery game made up of individual chapters that were each super satisfying to solve. The sequel, The rise of the golden idolapparently coming out on November 12th. It’s coming to a number of platforms, including on mobile via Netflix; the announcement trailer also mentions PC (via Steam), PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch.

You have a month to catch up on the original game, which is plenty of time as it isn’t long (6-8 hours depending on how quickly you solve the mysteries). However, it’s a game that you’ll think about forever afterwards and wish you could delete from your memory and play again because it’s so creepy and cool.

Here’s how it works: Each chapter of the game depicts a different crime in progress, as depicted in this game’s strange and disturbing art style. You never get to see the whole crime; you just see the events immediately before, during, or after depicted in a short looping video that’s about the length of a typical animated GIF. In that short animation you have all the clues you need to understand what happened, and you have a notebook with a series of words you can select to spell out what you think it was. The mysteries start out simple enough but get progressively stranger, with one layering on top of the next to build out a connecting story.

Watch this trailer for The rise of the golden idol really excited me because at the end of the first game I had no idea where the story could go next. It seemed like every loose end had been explained and resolved. This next game looks the same, but the idol – this time a stone monkey statue – looks very different, as do the characters and events at hand. So I suspect this will be a series of interlocking mysteries in a similar style, telling a different story about a different mystical object.

If you like mysteries with a supernatural slant, or word-based puzzle games like Obra Dinn or Baba is youcircle back and play Case of the golden idol and mark your calendars for the follow-up when it comes out next month. A demo is already available for it The rise of the golden idol that also includes a prologue and the first mystery chapter.