[White Night Talk] The Cloze version of “The Return of Oberra Din” can also be fun

It’s not easy to like a game, but sometimes it’s harder to find a meal replacement that you like.

Not all games have the same steady stream of good imitators as the distinctive hits like “Vampire Survivor” and “Dark Souls.” Many impressive indie games are unforgettable because of their unique playing experience, but also because their gameplay and temperament are too special, causing players to want to relive this experience, except to restart the game over and over again. Eagerly awaiting the sequel. For example, “FEZ” mentioned in the night talk before, fans welcomed its successor “TUNIC” 10 years after its birth.

Fortunately, players who like “The Return of Oberra Din” are much luckier, because only after 4 years, it can be called the game that it replaces meals – “The Case of the Golden Idol” (The Case of the Golden Idol) has already appeared.

The case of human spontaneous combustion in “The Golden Idol Mystery Case”

Whether it can be called “The Return of Obra Din” as a meal replacement, although the player has the final say, if there is an endorsement by the author himself, it will undoubtedly be more authoritative. In fact, many fans of “The Return of Obera Din” (such as me) learned about the game “Golden Idol Mystery” through the former producer Lucas Pope.

Since investing in the development of the new work, Lucas Pope has rarely posted other tweets on Twitter except for the news of the new work and the mobile phone port version of “Please Show ID”. But suddenly one day, he recommended a demo of a game to fans, and said that players who like the gameplay of “Obra Din’s Return” should try it out. This game is “The Golden Idol Mystery”.

This compliment of Lucas was also put into the game introduction on the Steam store by the production team.

The gameplay of “The Golden Idol Mystery” can indeed see many shadows of “The Return of Obra Din”.

As a deduction and puzzle game, “Golden Idol Mystery” is different from most detective games on the market. It does not have a case story that moves forward with the passage of time, but locks the content that players can explore in the A frozen moment.

In this time-freezing scene, we can see the moment of the murder in the middle of it, or the scene after the case has already happened. Players need to judge the identity of the characters, the logic of how things are going, and of course the most important answers to each case based on the characters’ lines, personal belongings, letter content, and even clothes.

The moment of pause in the first case

In each case, in addition to judging the identity of the character, other things that need to be inferred will change with the circumstances of the case. For example, in the first case that basically assumed the role of teaching, we only need to correspond to the identities of the two people, determine who pushed who off the cliff, and determine the location based on the scene and the map.

In later cases, inferring the location part of the puzzle may turn into guessing the rank represented by the furniture and clothing in the cult, which room the servants belong to, or calculating the points corresponding to each violation according to the trial results.

According to the previous picture, it is enough to solve the position puzzle on the far right

As the game progresses, the difficulty of “The Golden Idol Mystery” will naturally rise. However, this is nothing compared to the blow to domestic players without Chineseization.

In the first few levels of the game, there are not many words, and the style of painting looks relatively friendly. When it comes to the next level, it’s hard not to think of the head-scratching cloze in the English exam.

If we only talk about the difficulty of text translation, the overall text volume of “The Golden Idol Mystery Case” is not large, and theoretically it is not difficult to translate into other languages. But there are some puzzles in the game that are highly bound to English, such as judging the name of everyone at the gaming table by relying on the initials of the English name on the bill; or a noun extracted from the letter, which is used when decrypting. As far as its verb meaning is concerned, these may be the reasons why the game is only available in English.

However, “The Golden Idol Mystery” has done a very good job in rendering the atmosphere of the story. It uses multiple seemingly unrelated homicides around a family to string together a series of stories about golden idols. When I looked up a small number of unknown words in each level, I could basically sort out the logic of the case. What you have to do after that is to fill in the answer according to your own understanding and speculation. There are no synonyms that are difficult to distinguish in the alternative answers. Big difference.

Rich image information can also lower the threshold of understanding

It sounds like I learned a lot of English words while playing the game. But unfortunately none of the words I looked up in the game are still in my head now. Because learning English with games is a false proposition.

I have also tried to rely on the dictionary to nibble on “Special Eight Travelers” and “IELTS Sea”, but finally gave up because of the too awkward experience. The complicated operation of looking up a dictionary is not part of the normal game experience in the design of the development team, and will inevitably disrupt and weaken the excitement of the game itself.

So even if I have cleared the “Golden Idol Mystery”, I still look forward to the birth of an excellent Chinese version. Just like many JRPGs that combine Japanese puzzles, they can also launch high-quality Chinese versions.

However, after all, “Golden Idol Mystery” has not yet been determined whether it will be Chinese. If you can accept the extra operation of looking up a few words in the game, this game is still worth trying in advance – it can be called “Oberra” There are not many games for meal replacements in The Return of Ding. Of course, you won’t learn any English in this “cloze” game.