Don't Judge A Game By Its Cover

When I first saw The Case of the Golden Idol, I was repulsed. Just look at those faces. Those beady eyes, gaping mouths, and unsettling side profiles. Sickening. But a tweet from game developer Lucas Pope convinced me to jump in, and what I discovered was one of the best releases of last year — a hearty logic puzzle of a video game that tickled my brain like few others.

Pope himself is the designer of Return of the Obra Dinn, another one of those games that’s been carefully crafted to make you feel like a genius for playing it. Both Golden Idol and Obra Dinn are detective stories in which a bunch of people have been murdered and you have to figure out what happened. Both show you a snapshot of the moment behind each death and ask you to piece together what happened. In The Case of the Golden Idol, you scour tableaus as an omniscient observer, prodding in characters’ pockets for notes and jewelry that might offer clues to the larger story. One farmhand might be holding a letter addressed to him; another might wear a ring whose significance won’t be made apparent until much later. You’ll have to use these clues to fill in MadLib-like scrolls that describe the events of each scene: [blank] wanted to [blank] [blank], so they [blank] [blank] and so on.

Over the course of a dozen cases or so, decades will pass and the grand scope of the story will reveal itself. You can’t change or influence events the way you might in other narrative games, but piecing together this story through gumshoe deduction is just about as satisfying as it gets. This year, the developers of The Case of the Golden Idol released two expansion packs for the game, each comprising three additional missions. They’re both fantastic, serving as a prequel to the main game and tying the saga together in delightful form. They’ve said they’re done with DLC, and I cannot wait to see what they do next.

The developers of The Case of the Golden Idol (who are based in Latvia) have also put out the entire first chapter to play for free on your browser. So do yourself a favor and check it out, even if you find yourself repelled by those faces. The unsettling nature of the art might grow on you (I now honestly love it) — or maybe you’ll just stop noticing when you’re absorbed in figuring out just what the heck is going on with Edmund Cloudsley.

Now on to the roundup…

Things I did recently

• Spent a few months on leave from my day job at Bloomberg News to work on my next book, which is maybe… 80% done?… and will hopefully be published in the fall of 2024. We’ll make a formal announcement hopefully next… spring?… in this newsletter, of course.

• Dug into the saga behind Baldur’s Gate 3, one of the year’s most impressive games, and published a magazine feature about the ubiquitous Final Fantasy series and how it stays relevant by constantly reinventing itself (despite Final Fantasy XVI having some real problems… it’s a game that I’ve really soured on after some distance).

• Detailed the story behind Redfall, a rare flop from Arkane, best known for critically acclaimed immersive sims like Prey and Dishonored. The biggest problem? A studio known for making single-player immersive sims pivoting to a multiplayer shooter, driving away all of the people who had joined to make single-player immersive sims and didn’t want to pivot to a multiplayer shooter.

• Broke news on the struggles of a multiplayer game based on The Last of Us and interviewed folks like the director behind the sequel to Cyberpunk 2077 and Double Fine boss Tim Schafer.

• Continued to record weekly episodes of Triple Click, diving into this year’s hottest games and also some old ones, like Perfect Dark and StarCraft II.

Things I liked recently

• PsychOdyssey, the phenomenal 32-part documentary telling the story of Psychonaut 2’s development, is a must-watch if you care about video games even the slighest. And it’s totally free.

• Some good books: It’s Not TV by Felix Gillette and John Koblin, Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson, and Unscripted by James B. Stewart and Rachel Abrams

• My Perfect Console, an interview podcast by journalist Simon Parkin that’s full of delightful, fascinating guests

• Baldur’s Gate 3. I mean, holy shit.