This year, I decided I’d finally play 2022’s Case of the Golden Idol, a mystery game that thrusts you onto the scene of a murder moments after it’s happened. You pan through several screens, absorb every detail you possibly can, gather clues in the form of nouns and verbs, and make logic-based deductions by filling in the missing details in passages that tell the story of what occurred there. There are systems in place to guide you in the right direction, and the game begins quite simply, but by its end, I was being pushed to my absolute limit. The first few cases took all of about 10-25 minutes, but the final one in the game seemed to stretch across the span of an entire night. My head was positively bursting with possible motives and culprits, and kudos to Case of the Golden Idol for allowing me the room to be wrong about these cases until I eventually divined the right permutation of terms and cracked the case. It was one of the most frustrating ends of a game ever, and I was enamored of the whole experience.
I bring up Case of the Golden Idol and this frustration because, overwhelmingly, many of 2024’s best games provided me with that very same feeling. These stellar titles, like Animal Well, Rise of the Golden Idol, and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, are composed of what seems like countless of the most nefarious and confounding puzzles I’ve come across, some of which still vex and evade me to this day. And yet, despite that recurring headache–brought on by slamming my head into a proverbial wall over and over again–I wouldn’t trade the experiences I had with them for anything.
I was wrong a lot in Rise of the Golden Idol, 2024’s sequel to the aforementioned Case. I frequently confused names and aliases, and as the levels grew in scale (and the scenarios grew in complexity), I missed a lot of smaller details in the immaculately rendered environs that had been planted to provide insight and direction. I misunderstood the events of the game on numerous occasions, and was more surprised than usual at the revelations that were revealed by a level’s end. Rise of the Golden Idol was thoroughly frustrating, and yet it’s clearly one of the best games I’ve played all year because when I pushed it, it pushed back.
Rise of the Golden Idol’s increasingly challenging cases urged me to think harder about the conclusions I was coming to. In my favorite of these cases, a man in an apartment complex is washing what appears to be a bloody stain from his shirt, leading me to believe that he was the epicenter of an inciting event that recently affected this community. Having taken the bait, I operated under the guise that I was correct until the game brutally rejected my conclusion and challenged me to make actual deductions rather than be shepherded to a point via obvious breadcrumb trails. It trusted me to figure things out.
A handful of my favorite games this year similarly refused to provide me with easy and obvious answers. I’m not entirely sure Animal Well has anything even remotely resembling a proper resolution. I mean, there’s an ending to work towards, but the game also withholds so many more secrets that I may never see, and that’s a thrilling and distinct relationship to have to a game when 100% completion guides are available online within days of a game’s release. Animal Well is a mystery I suspect I will never get the satisfaction of fully solving. Instead, I get to fumble around in its dark caves for what seems like an eternity, prodding at its curiosities and objects of interest.
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is perhaps the most enigmatic of the bunch. Every door’s contents is locked behind another puzzle. Televisions are hooked up to video game consoles that contain hidden directions and clues within their low-poly video games. Every line of dialogue is an esoteric headtrip. Walls are lined with posters that obscure patterns that are keys to boxes. Written notes contain ciphers, and there are otherworldly portals that take you to elaborately constructed mazes. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is such a defiant game; it absolutely refuses to level with the player, opting instead to frequently demand that they rise to its level, a feat it is confident the player can achieve, in order to unlock its secrets.
I appreciate the room that these titles and others have given me this year because it feels increasingly rare. Games these days are often criticized for featuring too many tutorials or guideposts, and due to these trends, they can often feel reluctant to let go of the player’s hand. Just this year, there have been countless conversations around yellow paint in level design, which is used to funnel players towards objectives and can be a blessing or a curse depending on who you ask. There’s no right way to think about this design philosophy, but I do sincerely believe that the industry has erred on the side of hand holding a little too strongly, and it has flattened the experience of playing, or at least, the feelings that play can elicit. Of course, it’s worth considering what mold of game I’m talking about when I suggest such a radical shift. Open-world games have a different responsibility to their players than puzzle games do, which could stand in the way of these developers bucking the trends I’m outlining. Still, the hope is that by speaking to the merits of the exemplary design in puzzle and mystery games, that more games of different genres might feel emboldened to pursue similar philosophies. I think it could work to brilliant effect, and in truth, it already has.
I always come back to The Legend of Zelda and its famously “hidden” bomb walls. The NES couldn’t really afford the space for a different texture on these walls, making them appear like any other surface. However, they were in fact hidden across the game’s world, incentivizing players to go out and discover them by any means necessary. Eventually, players discovered that by placing bombs at very select segments of walls, they could find hidden rooms and treasures. There’s not a doubt in my mind that this was infuriating as all hell, but I also love that the game challenged players to be thoughtful, and in return it rewarded them with wonders beyond what they thought possible.
I don’t believe that enough games–or at least a lot of the titles that take up the general mindshare and which often dominate the conversations we have about the medium– are really challenging players all that much. That’s what makes this trio of games, which all broke into the mainstream, feel like a breath of fresh air. As many titles shunt me from set piece to set piece, allowing very little in the way of exploration of experimentation, I’ve begun feeling like an observer more than a driving force in the games I play. The same can’t be said about Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, Animal Well, or Rise of the Golden Idol, games which made me feel like the best and most capable version of myself. Each of these games is distinct from the other. They occupy different genres and employ different styles, but they’re united in their utter belief in the player. My hope is that games that follow, regardless of their genre, size, or developer, can take some cues from these remarkable titles and make strides to cultivate a sense of wonder and discovery again.
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