Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.For a game whose plot revolves around the curse of a mysterious statuette and whose outlandish aesthetics sit somewhere between American Expressionism and early 2000s web comics, The Rise of the Golden Idol does a brilliant job of making you feel like a real detective. After several hours of sleuthing, I hadn’t quite made a pinboard with clues connected by coloured string, but I had been scribbling all manner of notes on paper.Many were an effort just to keep track of the vast cast of the point-and-click detective game, a sequel to 2022’s The Case of the Golden Idol. An opening scene introduces two of them: an asylum patient, wearing only a pink and white checked apron, garrotting his giant of a nurse, the moment seemingly frozen in time as he writhes his last on the floor. Your job, as an unnamed and unseen investigator, is to get to the bottom of this and a spate of other strange incidents surrounding the Golden Idol. Each case is a cinemagraph: a short, looping scene in which something always seems on the cusp of happening. This is both an opportunity to take in all manner of strange situations — an aviary, a talent show, a high-stakes auction — and a fitting representation of the state you’ll find yourself in while sleuthing, always one tantalising step away from a brilliant deduction.Icons scattered across the scenes indicate points of interest. Click on them and they reveal words and clues — a weapon, a fingerprint, a name tag. Those words must then be used to fill in short paragraphs about the characters’ actions as you build up a picture of what exactly happened. Fitting together the right words in the right order is an exercise in observation, logical thinking and grammar, since certain words will only fit in certain places.The solution often lies as much in the scene as a whole as in the individual points of interest. In one early case I found myself so fixated on details — names, identities, motives — that I neglected to observe the large bloodied rock in the centre of the frame.Some of this can be blamed on the visuals — the aesthetic isn’t quite as distinctive as that of The Case of the Golden Idol — but the tone is just right. Thanks to a cast of comically exaggerated characters, the shaggy-dog story never gets weighed down by the sheer volume of murders. And this matters because they need to lodge firmly enough in your memory that you’ll recognise the ones who resurface later in the case.It’s a lot to keep track of, but it’s testament to the writing that I found myself lying awake in bed one night trying to piece together means and motives. The cleverest puzzle games aren’t complicated for the sake of it — they make their players feel equal to the challenge. The Rise of the Golden Idol repeatedly convinced me that I’d achieved the impossible, even when I simply followed the evidence.★★★★☆On PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox One and Series X/S and Nintendo Switch now
