Solving a scenario in Golden Idol series is rather like deciphering a prophecy. All you have is the image of one or two moments frozen in time, and it’s up to you to make sense of them. You need the keywords and character names, yes, but then you need to assemble them into a message using the right descriptive terms and actions. The Lemurian Phoenix, the second of four DLCs promised to The Rise of The Golden Idol, is about a literal prophecy, serving as a return-to-form of sorts to the world of cults, mystics, and frauds. Five new challenging scenarios tell an overarching self-contained side mystery to the main game, so you don’t need to have played the first DLC, The Sins of New Wells, to get stuck into The Lemurian Phoenix.
The base game starts you off easy for the first few hours, but the DLCs pull no punches: each scenario is tougher than the last. That said, they’re the perfect digestible size at four-to-five scenarios each, which allows you to complete them in one or two sessions. The DLC “The Lemurian Vampire” from the Case of the Golden Idol was the first detailed look players got at Lemurian culture (the origin of the titular golden idol itself). In it, we learned that it wasn’t just nasty colonialists who would misuse the idol for their own ends; Lemurians are just as capable of falling prey to temptation. The Lemurian Phoenix DLC shows us that the more things change, the more they stay the same in this new tale set within the country of Lemuria in this series’ alternate 20th century.
As fictional nations go, Lemuria is a fascinating one, so I was excited for a storyline set there. Case referenced the country but never set foot there, so it’s a bit like getting a peek behind the curtain. This new mystery in Rise is set within the context of the country’s traditionalist mindset and integration of religion and state, and doesn’t actually involve the golden idol at all. Set over a period of a few years, this series of mysteries is more similar in tone to Case than Rise, which in my opinion, is a good thing. As I explain in my review of Rise, I still find Case to be the superior of the two games, owing to the creepy atmosphere of death consistently following the characters who come into contact with it; something that Rise didn’t always have. There is a death in all but one of the five scenarios in the Lemurian Phoenix, and it’s exactly what I enjoyed about Case: they’re is an immediate mystery —the whodunnit— followed by the secondary one, which is how on Earth it fits in with the broader narrative. I love to see that iconic description: the man is not breathing.
It’s harder to do that in the Lemurian Phoenix than usual, because the timeline has been purposely obfuscated, but it’s still enough to put each new scenario into context. The exact timeline of events forms its own puzzle later. After each solve, the game presents you with some extra evidence in the form of documents, letters and the like, but it’s up to you to see how they fit within the narrative.
Without spoiling you for the full story, the motives at play here are some Golden Idol classics: greed, fanaticism, and revenge. I will say that the motive of one of the major characters feels like small potatoes in comparison to the motives of other masterminds in this series. The motive is a sympathetic as you can get, but it’s revealed a little bit too late and suddenly to be effective. It left me thinking, “Oh, is that all it was?” when some clever early foreshadowing might have made it live up to the other masterminds.
“I love to see that iconic description: the man is not breathing.”
This adventure introduces a hieroglyphic-like language that comes into play in the last two scenarios, and it’s one of my favourite puzzle sets in the game. These symbols are a kind of prophecy, and understanding the symbols is key to understanding the mystery. Using multiple sets of symbols, you have to use the few meanings you’re given and the method of elimination to work out the meaning of each symbol. Logical puzzles like these are always good because you don’t need to make any leaps of logic to figure things out. This kind of puzzle has proven popular over the last few year, too; if I got three nickels for every recent puzzle game that tasked me with deciphering an obscure language steeped in tradition, I’d have three nickels! Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened thrice.
The Rise of the Golden Idol and the first two DLC are available now on PC, PlayStation, Xbox, iOS, and Android. The last two DLC will release sometime in Q3 2025.
About the Author
Edie W-K
she/her
If it isn't video games, Edie doesn't care about it. She's been playing games since the N64 era, and only spent enough time away from her 3DS to earn a Bachelor in Games Design from RMIT.
