A Noir-Inspired Mystery
Golden Enigma is an adventure game where you unravel the mystery behind a series of murders. It’s established indie game developer Game Stew‘s first foray into a narrative-based game, as they’re mainly known for Tower of Fortune. The game consists of written dialogue and slot-based gameplay, giving the player little control over the action. The thin world-building and uninteresting gameplay make the title feel shallow.
The player takes control of Mark Sterling, a Tracer that solves crimes involving robots. In this case, it’s the murder of robot citizens that cause Mark to be dispatched. The game tries to go for a noir aesthetic with femme fatales and a conspiracy, but it more has the feel of an overdone spy thriller instead.
Exploring Newlyn City
The setting is retro-futuristic with sentient robots roaming the streets of Newlyn City. It seems that both humans and robots are treated as full citizens but Golden Enigma never elucidates this. As a matter of fact, there’s remarkably little world-building.
What’s apparent is that Newlyn is an urban hellscape. Vehicular duels appear to be so common that they require no comment from either Mark or his handler. These battles not only consist of (presumably) high-speed chases but also ramming one another and shooting at each other. Does that mean that hood-mounted Gatling guns are a normal vehicular accessory?
Mark is also regularly accosted on the street by thieves or rogues who “hate law enforcers.” Though I’m uncertain how they can tell that Mark qualifies, as he’s a plain-clothes detective.
The lawlessness appears to cease at a casino called the Golden Goddess, where Mark spends a lot of the game. Here he converses with other patrons and gathers clues.
Frustrating Battles
Every interactive part of the game, be it battle, investigation, or conversing with passersby is done by playing slots. In battle, the options are to attack, stun, or receive money. There’s also a wild card that’ll switch to match what the first slot landed on.
The way it’s set up, the first slot is paramount, as it determines everything that happens. Matches only count if the second slot matches the first. For instance, if you draw attack, stun, attack, Mark will only fire one shot, while attack, attack, stun will fire twice.
It frustrated me, because luck was driving everything. Yes, I could level up Mark’s equipment and car to improve their stats, but the results of the slots were always the determining factor. It might have been possible to control what the first slot landed on, but I never got the hang of it. Losing battles irritated me because it felt like the game controlled who won.
Due to the randomness of the battles, Mark ended up in the infirmly a lot. Getting healed cost money that I wanted to save for upgrades, so I made use of the healing power of flirting—which isn’t as much fun as it sounds. I appreciate that pickup artists tend to use the same lines, but generally not on the exact same people. I find it hard to believe that the developer didn’t expect players to do this repeatedly. Did they really think that I wouldn’t want to throw my iPhone across the room by the fifteenth time?
A Barebones Story
The mystery that drives the story is who murdered the victims and why. That’s really the only interesting aspect, but Golden Enigma throws a lot of detours in your path. And I don’t mean that in terms of red herrings or even Mark’s incessant womanizing.
The story progresses in a straight line, with Mark figuring out the mystery easily. But there are conversations with NPCs that pop up regularly. Conversations without any real dialogue. Instead you just play slots.
An effective conversation results in upping your HP and gaining money, but it’s boring. I didn’t learn any more about the world, Mark, or even the people who inhabit it. It felt like a distraction that I just had to get out of the way.
Golden Enigma‘s story is further interrupted by the fact that the game froze five or so times while I was playing. It forced me to restart the app to continue. Thankfully the game saved constantly, so I hardly lost any progress, but it added to the feeling of wasting time.
An Ineffective Parody
Despite Golden Enigma saying that it has a film noir style, it feels much more like a Sean Connery Bond movie. I assumed that the developer was trying to parody the style: Mark does introduce himself as “Mark. Mark Sterling,” after all. Yet there was so little to the story that I couldn’t be sure.
Mark works for an organization with an operations officer that he can’t help but flirt with. It means nothing because he can’t seem to help flirting with every female being he encounters, human or robot. He wins over a woman he’d loved and left by throwing an expensive piece of jewelry in a fireplace—because destruction of property is hot, apparently—and telling her that it was worthless compared to her.
The whole aesthetic feels very dated and exasperated me more than amused me. It likely would’ve been better if the characters weren’t one-dimensional. There’s so little dialogue and such a barebones story that I felt like I didn’t know anything about anyone—even Mark. The characters were just sketched-out archetypes.
Even at the base, two of the people there aren’t even named: a robot nurse and a new recruit. You’re able to converse with them, but no matter how many times you do, the dialogue doesn’t change, and you can’t skip it, either.
