| Hi everyone. Today we’re talking about a hit mystery video-game series that even Netflix Inc. is into, but first... This week’s top gaming news: In the fall of 2022, a pair of Latvian brothers released a video game that they feared nobody would see. They knew it was a good game — play-testers were loving it — but it was proving a difficult concept to sell to the public. The Case of the Golden Idol, with its cerebral gameplay and unsettling (even off-putting) art style, was tough to encapsulate in screenshots and gifs. How do you capture the appeal of a game in which you spend most of your time staring and thinking? “The game was hard to market,” said Andrejs Kļaviņš, who created the game with his brother Ernests. “It felt like we might not be noticed at all,” Ernests added. Yet in the end, the lack of clear selling points didn’t matter much to players. The brothers teamed up with a publisher, Playstack, that helped them market and distribute the game. Thanks to strong critical acclaim and word of mouth, The Case of the Golden Idol would go on to sell 250,000 units (base game and expansions included) and spawn a sequel, The Rise of the Golden Idol, which comes out next week. Both games are mysteries with a similar structure. You navigate through a series of tableaus depicting the aftermath of some grisly event, usually a murder, and try to figure out what happened. The introduction to the first game, for example, shows the aftermath of one person pushing another off a cliff. You click around the screen to try to learn everyone’s names, then fill in the blanks to solve the mystery, Mad Libs-style. “[Blank] pushed [blank] because he wanted to [blank].” It’s a pleasantly brain-twisting experience, like one of those SAT logic puzzles (“the woman in the red hat sat next to the man with the green shoes”) but on a larger scale. I’ve played through an early copy of the sequel and am delighted to report that it’s just as great. The Kļaviņš brothers started working on the first game in 2021, following a period in which they worked on what Andrejs called “absolutely evil” freemium games designed for social networks. They gave themselves 18 months to develop a game they actually wanted to make, inspired by point-and-click adventures as well as by the hit 2019 deduction game Return of the Obra Dinn. Although The Case of the Golden Idol has not sold millions of copies, it has resonated with a specific type of video-game player — one who enjoys cerebral mysteries that are less about twitching and more about thinking. Players who love the game really love it. In 2023, the brothers released two expansions that added new scenarios to the game. Common wisdom in the video-game industry is that expansions have a low attach rate. Getting around 30% of players to buy them is considered a big win. The Case of the Golden Idol’s first expansion had a 52% attach rate while its second came in at 44%, according to Playstack — astonishing numbers that speak to how much players love the game. “Our second year was almost as good as the first one,” Andrejs said. Now, the brothers hope to surpass that success with the sequel, which adds a modern flavor to the formula. The first game was set in the 18th century and centered on the eponymous golden idol, a magical statue that could be used to immolate enemies or even steal years off of their lives. The Rise of the Golden Idol, set in the 1970s, brings the idol forward into a world of scientists, hippies and broadcast television. The story is a blast, the deduction is as compelling as ever and the sequel brings some welcome tweaks to the user interface. The new game is larger than its predecessor, and this time, the brothers brought in additional writers and designers to help with development. They also struck a deal with Netflix to help distribute both games on mobile platforms, where they are included with a subscription. One of the reasons Netflix was attracted to Golden Idol was its ability to be serialized, with a regular cadence of new mysteries and releases. “Video game serialization is this holy grail that hasn’t been achieved fully,” Andrejs said. “You have live services, you have sequels, but you don’t have a series of smaller things.” To go along with that theme, The Rise of the Golden Idol will receive four expansions throughout 2025 as the brothers hope to see similarly strong attach rates from hooked players. The idea of a serialized Golden Idol, with new games arriving at a regular clip, might seem like catnip for mystery fans who gobble up new scenarios as quickly as they’re released. But the brothers say they’re not sure if they plan to make new games in the series after this one. It will depend in part on how well The Rise of the Golden Idol does, they said. But “there’s definitely fatigue” after releasing two games and a host of expansions, Andrejs said. Their schedule over the last three years has been relentless. And they don’t want to be pigeonholed, no matter how successful the franchise may be. “We don’t want to be the people that do this one thing,” Ernests said. You could play the demo for The Rise of the Golden Idol in anticipation of the full release on Tuesday. It’s good! But since I’ve already finished that one, I’ll be checking out Nintendo’s Mario & Luigi: Brothership. The new Mario role-playing game has received mixed reviews, and I’m curious to check it out. I’ve always found the Mario & Luigi series to be quite charming. | 
