I really, really enjoyed Rise of the Golden Idol
There are gonna be some mild spoilers here for the premise of Rise of the Golden Idol! If you want to go in completely raw-brain, do not read this!!
I finished the game and really enjoyed myself. It's certainly a better game than its predecessor, though both are fantastic. It's more difficult and complex in a good, non-punishing way, and its puzzles are more involved, and it brilliantly reuses some mechanical stuff from the ending of the first game in a way that enriches the whole thing. Brilliant, brilliant stuff. I loved it.
In particular, I loved how it took the precise topics the first game was obsessed with - disgusting aristocratic ambition, maniacs scheming to optimize human society, the problem with people who get drunk on their own intellect, etc - and reapplied them in a brand new setting, much more contemporary. It's always been so impressive to me that the first game hit as well as it did with a plot set in the 18th century, but this one takes all of the first game's preoccupations and finds a spot for them in a setting influenced by the 60s and 70s in the US and Europe.
It feels like a game written by people who know their way around a library of 1970s thriller films, which is my favorite type of film collection to get lost in, personally. It feels like these folks have watched all my favorite deranged thrillers about scientists and heisters and conspiracy theories and found a way to make those themes feel fresh. I really liked it.
Like the first game, it has a core cast of characters who scheme with one another, trick one another, double-cross each other, and so on. But the story is much more character-focused than the first game, so it gets a lot more out of its cast than the first game did. There's less deranged hostility among the various people playing off one another in the story, and much more seething, inter-office political wrangling, and frustrated coexistance. It works really well.
Cannot recommend this enough. It's a hard game to screenshot, but it's extremely good-looking. Beautifully grotesque. The animation is fun as shit. A picture-book of nasty little freaks, full of extremely genre-ass stuff. I cannot wait to see what this team does next.