Game 19: The Case of the Golden Idol

We begin with a choice. And that choice.... is a game settings option.

You have permission to laugh at me later if I get stuck because I can't find something.

To those brave souls who would choose the latter option - I salute you but I see nothing but frustration in the prospect of being unable to locate the clickable thing. Let's get this show on the road!

We start straight into a murder scene. I hope I'm neither of these characters, one is dead and one has terrible fashion sense.

Cause of death: Pushed off a 10-foot cliff.

Looks like I have two 'modes', Exploring and thinking. Exploring lets me click around objects in the scene and inspect them. The scene is on an animation loop which gives it a sense of life, there's a thunderstorm happening in the background and occasionally lightning strikes. I found a contract! You can click on names here to 'obtain' them down below.

I have in my inventory a list of names.

Also, I found what I presume is the Golden Idol in one of the bags in camp, thanks to my X-ray vision.

Solved the Case of the Golden Idol already! This guy has it!

Thinking mode takes me to a 'fill in the blank' page on this scene, so we'll work on that. It's odd that one person is here in identities but the scroll will list two people.

I can move the words in my inventory around so I can organize them and keep first / last names straight, I suspect this will be very helpful to do all the time. Ooooh the victim isn't dead yet, this scene is right after he was pushed and the Doctor (I found a scalpel on him) is currently in the act of falling off the cliff. The people were easy enough, now I have to fill in the location - I found a map which fills in an area of the Thinking pad and it helpfully shows both the map and the scene terrain which I'll need to compare to the map to figure out which cliff this is.

Or I could brute force this by listing all four places but we're not desperate yet.

Success! When you fill everything out you can move on. I suspect this entry will be very spoiler heavy and since the entire game is about figuring these things out, if the game appeals to you personally it's probably a good time to pause here and play it.

Albert swears it was in self defense!

Scene 2: An entirely different guy is also dead.

The horse is having a great time running in circles around the house.

What, exactly, am I in this game? I don't appear to be a character that's going around and investigating things. I'm more like a wandering spirit that's just checking out dead people and trying to understand things. This guy changed clothes a lot. A whole lot.

Cause of Death: Chafing

Apparently the Lord Sebastian Cloudsley suffered an hunting accident and fell of his horse and suffered a head wound while hunting. I think that's the idol on the left side of the room. Scene 3! Actually, wait a sec... a hanging green figure has showed up on scenario selection.

What are you doing here, this is the scenario selection menu! I wanted to check out burning man!

Clicking on him yields a short vignette on the Lord's funeral. Is that Albert on the left there?

Now I must investigate the Case of the Woman With No Neck

Actually Scene 3! Oh boy, there's a lot going on here!

Exactly one person is reacting appropriately to this.

And there's a lot to find out!

All I know right now is that the last two words are gonna be Spontaneous Combustion.

The green-suited fellow in the middle of the scene has the Idol... or an Idol? The jewel is blue, but I think in the prior scene it was Red. He has a note that says: To perform the combustion trick, you must first cast a freezing spell. Are people using this idol to perform magic? Does the jewel change color based on the magic used which is why it's blue, or is there more than one Idol?

The Idol's jewel and some magic glyphs on it, along with some sort of little lever.

It's not relevant to this scene I think but everyone here except Green Suit is carrying a bladed weapon of some sort. Even the guy on fire has a scorched knife. I suspect that in the future I may need to go back and refer to earlier scenes to get clues about later scenes. Oh there's even more going on, clicking on the right door reveals an additional part of the scene with two people inside the building.

These scenes could get pretty complex.

This is really well done and I'm having fun piecing together information from clues in the scene. For example, determining the identity of the two guys on the far left: I figure out from the hairbrush the burning guy is holding and the modest attire that they're the two stableboys that work the horses, one of them is carrying a book that says 'Property of the Pear brothers' and I find that their first names are Adam and James. But which one is Adam, which is James? It isn't obvious, but the un-burnt brother is carrying a knife. A knife with a letter on it.

Adam looks like he's having a bad time but James is much worse off.

There's also a second way to infer the same information - the guy on the right is carrying a newspaper which says today is Monday, the door has a schedule listing 'J' or 'A' on horse grooming for each day of the week, and burning guy is carrying a burnt brush. So there's multiple interesting ways to discover a piece of information. Also... what orders were those, Adam? Did you kill your brother, Adam? Is the Idol message about spontaneous combustion a red herring? The Lawyer is carrying a list of inheritors - this scene takes place just after the dispensation of Lord Edmund Cloudsley's last will and testament. Three are family, and one is Willard Wright, and the lawyer is confused about why Willard here since he's not family. I think Willard Wright is the guy in the green jacket with the Idol.

Also Sebastian Cloudsley is 'Testate', which sound like either a very good or a very bad state to be in.

Oh! I see what happened here, in the first part of the scene - Peter Battley was in severe debt and all he got was a worthless book instead of a chunk of the inheritance. Furious, he grabbed his two servants and tried to take the Idol by force from Willard, and one of the servants then burst into flames - the Will says that Williard would know what to do with the Idol, so I'm back on board with the theory of it's actually magical and Willard knows how to use it.

I got everything right about this on the very first try and That! Feels! So! Damn! Good!

Scene 4: Murder at the Cursed Mermaid!

Pro tip: Do not include 'Cursed' in the name of your establishment. Upstairs, it's a classic 'victim is locked in the room with the key' murder.

Someone wanted RFVEN6L

Downstairs we're having a party!

With a pretty great music track in the background!

I want to know who the dead man is and I see that he's carrying a ring with a ruby. I remember that I saw that last scene so I immediately flip back there - Willard was carrying the same ring, so it's probably him. Cross-scene investigating is already here.

Don't feel too bad for Willard, he was into some serious cult stuff!

Something is up with this sleazy guy, in the last scene he was 'correctly' labeled as 'David Gorran', but even then he was carrying a piece of paper labeled 'Ash Blair'. This time his thinksheet name is 'Ash Blair' and it's definitely the same guy.

Which is the correct name? Or are neither correct and he's hiding his identity?

So that means the 'correct' people's names in a scene may not actually be the truth. In any case, Ash Blair appears to be the murderer - clues left about who was playing cards at a given time put him out of the game just before this scene and he had the other room rented upstairs. I didn't find the Idol in this scene but I assume Blair has it. Is this the Case of the Golden Idol or Curse of the Golden Idol? I think the Curse is that if you have it in one scene you're pretty much going to die in the next one. Another mid-scene interlude: A man wearing a red tassel and another red-jeweled ring is investigating Wright's murder.

Hey, I'M investigating the murders... is this actually me?

Ash Blair managed to survive the Curse by Not Appearing in the Next Scene. We are keeping with the motif of someone dying though! The latest victim is our Lady of No Neck, Rose Cubert.

Who would poison her?

The Idol is here in the house, locked in a wall safe. Guess Ash Blair managed to stash it here, he's working for Edmund Cloudsley (second from the left). Here's the thinksheet for this one. The identities a a bit easier because I've seen some of the characters in prior scenes, on the right it looks like we're in for a logic puzzle concerning where people sat at the table and where they were located in the house.

From the text I suspect Rose was not the intended poisoning target. Never poison someone at a buffet.

Ash Blair is a tobacco brand, among this group of servants our mystery guy is going by David Gorran. I might have to break out pen and paper for this scene, I need to figure out things like which servant has been around the longest (they get the bottom room), and I haven't seen any obvious initial clues to even get started with who was sitting where at the dinner table. Ah, a clue with which to find other clues!

Time to go back and read everything again!

Ah-ha, that plus an additional note led me to decipher an encoded message to reveal the identity of the murderer and the one who engaged their services for the murder: Darkhand Steward.

Ada Baker ended up poisoning the wrong person. Edmund got lucky here.

All right, next sce-KABOOM

Not quite powerful enough to blow their socks off.

Just outside the explosion room we find our mystery man David Gorran (Ash Blair), he's apparently up to no good and I think he has either hired some henchmen to help him obtain a corpse or he was trying to do it himself and someone hit him on the head. It's gone badly - he's been knocked out and is slumped over a scarecrow in a coffin, unconscious but still alive.

David's a survivor. So far.

Oh hey, the Lone Ranger on the right (Walter Keene, Gentleman Robber) is I think the guy that was investigating the murder in the vignette before, his hat has the tassel and he's got a ruby ring. Woah! I found an old occult dude hiding in a trunk!

He must have hidden quickly when the gang came in.

He has notes for David and a research book detailing what he's been trying to do with the Idol.

The Idol can do lots of things! It IS magic! Or.... sufficiently advanced technology....

I think David was off to collect a dead body for him and got suckered into carrying a coffin with a scarecrow in here and the bandits used it to follow him to try to steal the Idol from this guy. Wait.... IS THIS EDMUND? IS EDMUND CLOUDSLEY BALD? Flips scenes. I think he's been wearing a wig the whole time!

I'm starting to piece together the story. I think around fifty years ago Sebastian Cloudsley's father found the Idol on an island and murdered his partner and took sole control of it. Sebastian lived out his life researching the artifact but become involved with some sort of cult that wears the Ruby Rings and on his death gave the Idol to them. His son Edmund knew about his father's research and the power of the Idol and had his servant David Gorran murder the cult member Willard Wright and steal the Idol back. Edmund has been researching the Idol but the Ruby Ring cult is still after it - they tried to poison Edmund but ended up killing his wife Rose instead, and now they followed David back to the place where Edmund is experimenting on the Idol and Edmund used it to set an explosive trap for the henchmen. I'm looking forward to the next scene to see who ends up with the Idol after this, two of the robbers are caught in the explosion here but the guy in charge, Walter Keene is still on his feet with a pistol but he's about to be attacked by a dog.

Jaws that could trap a bear and a brain that craves manflesh.

I've pieced together most of what happened here, just need to get something right.

Happily if you get close the game will let you know, I'm just off on someone's name probably.

Oh that's odd, completing the story on the left (It was Edmund Cloudsley that needed the body but I'd argue that that meant David needed one too!) finished the scenario, I didn't need to fill in the glyphs on the right. I'm still going to go back and do that because understanding what function they have will probably be helpful in the future. Another vignette! We have David lying about what happened.

Perjury!

But was Edmund actually killed and David is covering up how it happened or is Edmund faking his own death? All we know is David survived and murder-mutt is doing just fine. Let's see if the next scene can shed some more light on this. Oh hey, it's a nice tranquil forest with a little door on the side of a hill.

Oh joy, Hobbits!

Ummmmm

Not Hobbits! IT'S NOT HOBBITS!

It is the Red Ring cult and they love creepy-ass masks. I gotta say I dig the grim reaper with the technicolor stained glass there. I've been thinking about what this game is and I've realized that it's similar to Return of the Obra Dinn, which is a deduction game that I absolutely loved, in that it wants you to determine identities and an understanding of the events that took place. The main difference between the two is that Obra Dinn is one giant puzzle, where in many cases you need to obtain clues from future and past scenes to determine identities and causes of death from later scenes. Case of the Idol's deduction is much more self contained - while I've occasionally gone back to a prior scene to try to ascertain something, so far those have been the exception to the rule of most clues being present within the scene I'm examining. I'd happily recommend either game to someone who enjoys figuring things out, and this one is probably the better introduction to it as Obra Dinn ends up being really massive in the sheer scope of what you need to do and this game is more bite-sized. Oh hey, found a guy.

Ominous music plays as I discover a man tied up in the bushes.

This guy is next to David Gorran's stuff but he clearly is not David Gorran. I think he's a cult member that Gorran jumped and dressed up as and Gorran is in his suit somewhere inside the cult hideout. I found a note that sheds little light on what happened after the last scene. Walter Keene survived and claims he found Edmund dead from the explosion, but was then driven off by 'A pack of hounds' and David Gorran and was unable to recover the Idol. Another cult member thinks Walter is full of it and kept the Idol for himself. Back to the scene with the two cups - the cult's rituals are unnecessarily complex. There's at least four different rituals that end up being the Princess Bride scene of each guy drinks a cup and hopes it's not the poisoned one. Walter Keene was challenged to this ritual by a David Sinclair who objects to Walter bringing another initiate into the cult (The new guy is shirtless in another room) This is a tough one! Everyone's in masks and have very few possessions to help identify them.

And what the fuck is this? Is it even a clue?

Oooooh, another note! It's from Walter Keene TO David Gorran! They're in cahoots! Keene has betrayed the cult (he must indeed be lying about the Idol) and revealed the location and time of this meeting to let Gorran sneak in. Gorran then positions himself as the poisoner guy to ensure that Keene survives the ritual, and they get their man Lazarus Herst initiated into the Cult. I think Edmund survived the blast and Walter was subdued by the dog and convinced to join Edmund. Scenario complete, pretty much nailed it (Not sure about Edmund yet). Onward! Interestingly, the next two scenes have simultaneously become available, which hasn't happened before. Perhaps this is a case where clues in the future scene are needed to solve the prior one. Scene 8 is a crowning ceremony at a lighthouse.

Maybe the guy or the right is just sleeping.

Looks like there's some repeat characters between the scenes and a lot of folks we haven't run into before, but I note that we've got cult masks off in the lighthouse scene so we're about to find out a lot about the Ruby Ring cult. Wow, the lighthouse appears to be where a genuine Miracle has taken place. The cult has rules for Gryphon's ascendency. The rule is that you have to perform a miracle. Then if some other member of the cult can do what you did, then it is merely 'magic' and the ascendent gets put to death. They have a poor track record of this. One guy tried to fly and fell to his death, and three others had their 'miracles' repeated by other cult members. But if you can perform a miracle, and nobody else can repeat it, then the masks come off and you are crowned as Gryphon. The masks have come off. Ah-ha, the three miracles that turned out not to be miracles were all repeated by the same guy - Angus McBain. That's the dead guy, now - they rubbed him out to stop him from repeating the miracle. The miracle, as it happens, involved the Idol being tucked into the large golden staff. I've figured out that that Idol has the power to draw matter into itself and expel it as well, and our miracle worker - Lazarus, the initiate from the prior scene - used it to pull in a bunch of air and then spit it out down the tube like a jet engine, enabling himself to fly around for a bit - or perhaps to jump off the top of the lighthouse and descend slowly. Angus got wind of how this was done and was going to repeat it but he appears to have met an untimely end.

Ah, he met his end because he was blackmailing Walter Keene to find out how the miracle was done. Keene gave him only partial information about how to perform the miracle - so when he jumped the Idol didn't do anything and he fell to his death. I didn't end up needing to refer to the next scene and I only had to trial-and-error one identity, so I'm not sure why the next one was already accessible.

Scene 9 is at a fancy house and someone's been murdered.

Seeing what the people were wearing here would have given me the identify of some in Scene 8.

The thinksheet is getting harder - I have to supply more than half of it now and basically figure out the whole story! Also they ramped up the difficulty on names, prior to this almost all names I found in first / last pairs, this time the good inspector helpfully recorded everyone's testimony using their first name only and then referred to everyone involved by their last names only.

Great puzzle, awful madlibs.

Ok, this is a political plot. The dead guy is Augustus Vallantine, leader of a major political party, and the guy in the eyepatch is the leader of another political party. A newspaper said that the two of them would likely form a coalition and thus one of them would become Prime Minister, but now Augustus is dead and Leopold has been framed for the murder, so no coalition. Who benefits from this? A third New Order party led by none other than Lazarus Herst! Assuming the cult pulls this murder / frame job off, he'll be Prime Minister. I'm pretty sure that's the gist of it but I'm having trouble getting the story correct on this one, I figured out the Butler got drugged at some point too and I'm not sure how that fits in. There's a lot of drugging going on, at least three people here were drugged.

Finally! I nearly gave in to using a hint.

That one took awhile, the story involved a whole sub-plot about what happened that I whiffed right by in pursuit of the murder. Forward we go, but first an interlude! Looks like Lazarus disposed of Keene once his usefulness ran out and he's showing off what the Idol is capable of.

The Idol taketh and the idol giveth away. Getting a fascist vibe from that armband.

Flipping back to the scene which had the magical symbols and the spellbook, let's figure out what the things that the Idol can do likely are. I only have an incomplete picture at this point but the Idol can suck in and subsequently expel: Air, matter, gold, and heat. The first of three runes on the Idol are 'Give' and 'Take' (or Suck in / Expel). The second two runes appear to be combinations of things. The recipe for freezing something is 'Take Matter Heat' and setting it on fire (as happened to the poor guy back in Scene 3) is 'Give Matter Heat'. Notably the Idol doesn't just generate the Heat from nothing, it first has to be used to freeze something by taking heat away before it can expel the heat and set something on fire. I'm thinking the Idol is alien technology, not magic.

'Give Matter Heat' gave that guy a real bad day.

There's also one other symbol I've seen regarding an apple experiment back in the explosion scene, and I think it may be 'Life'. The reason Edmund wanted a dead body to experiment on was because he tried 'Give Matter Life(?)' on an apple and obtained intriguing results. Next up - fascism! Armbands for everyone!

Kids, don't try this in your home country!

Mr. David Gorran is back! He's the enforcer in the open-face helmet on the right. He's doing all right for himself in the New Order. Papers, Please! Everyone's carrying their papers now.

Best keep that merit score high, citizen.

It's been all of three years since the last scene and High Arbiter Lazarus has reshaped society to his liking. It now operates under the four Maxims of Virtue. Holy.... we're done with figuring out people's identities (I guess it wouldn't make much sense with people carrying them now). Instead, I have to figure out fascism - specifically determining the four virtues and what various infractions cost how many demerits.

I did not go into this game expecting to do fascism mathematics but here we are.

Today's murder mystery is thus murder carried out by the State. The Idol isn't the problem - people are. The virtues sound great though! Beauty, Truth, Moderation, and Diligence! No problem there! Except that Moderation means you can't, for instance, display emotions or you suffer real consequences, and the other virtues have similarly devastating drawbacks. The poor guy being carried out of here is young Gideon Bell, who kept crying during his interrogation. Sorry Gideon, each instance of crying is a Moderation Violation. Lazarus has figured out the 'life' taking / giving power of the Idol and he's using it to steal years from people equal to their demerits in court - of which Gideon managed to rack up 88. 88 years gone and then given by the Idol to a group of children upstairs, I assume for Lazarus to use for himself later. This has taken a dark turn... ok, I know it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows prior to this, but an entire dystopian society is far worse than the occasional stablehand catching fire. Maybe there's a happy ending, let's continue!

Uh... is this a scene or a world map?

Oh, this is a huge one. To be fair it takes up the space of two scenes on the scene selection menu. There's multiple locations and lots of characters involved and three separate stories to figure out.

And at the top there's links to all of the prior scenes!

Those links to the past make me think that this time we're definitely going to have to delve back into prior scenes to figure things out here. Some of the locations today take place in the same locations as the earlier scenes.

Someone rolled a cannon into the room where the guy died in Scene 2 and blew some Order soldiers away.

The card-playing patrons of the Cursed Mermaid have changed very little!

Ok, so it looks like the New Order was planning on marching on the King's Palace (I guess they haven't fully consolidated control) and some of them have been waylaid and murdered. Couldn't have happened to nicer people. Hold the phone, I just noticed something.

Lazarus Herst has quite a nose and jawline doesn't he?

So does Edmund Cloudsley.

And we know Cloudsley was bald back then, he was wearing a wig. Lazarus showed up right when Edmund disappeared and we never saw Edmund again. I think Edmund figured out how to use the Life controls on the Idol and used it to de-age himself! Lazarus is Edmund! David Gorran finally meets his end, at Walter Keene's hand. Keene had 32 years taken from him in the tribunals and tried to ambush Lazarus in revenge, but Lazarus just sent Gorran to take care of him instead. Ha! Hahahaha! All Edmund / Lazarus' plans and hopes are undone as he violates one of his own virtues and lusts after another man's wife. That man is Peter Battley, a drunkard in massive debt who ended up inheriting Edmund's estate when he died and marrying a girl that Edmund sought. When Edmund showed up at his old house with troops, Battley was prepared.

Fuck yeah, Peter!

Whether the Idol was magic or alien technology quickly becomes irrelevant when a drunk man desperately protecting his wife fires a cannon at Lazarus from 6 feet away. The Idol is broken, and claims one last victim as the two remaining leaders of the Cult fight over it.

How about that - a happy ending after all!

I really enjoyed this game. There's some DLC for it so I may revisit this at some point and do those but if I do I'll make it a separate entry. If you find a golden idol, leave it alone, it's cursed.