The Case of the Golden Idol is a fantastic mystery video game that asks players to engage in a rigorous series of logic deductions to solve crimes spanning generations. It also has a game-breaking bug on the Nintendo Switch version that renders its DLCs unplayable.
Latvian-based studio Color Gray Games was founded in 2021 by brothers Andrejs and Ernests Klavins. The Case of the Golden Idol was their debut game when it launched for PC and Mac in October 2022, and it earned them a BAFTA for Best Debut Game. They released a port for Nintendo Switch in May 2023 that is unfortunately riddled with a heinous memory problem, even months later.
The Save Bug in The Case of the Golden Idol on Nintendo Switch
I greedily sped through the first few cases, devouring this delightfully ugly and brilliant detective game. Eventually, I had to close the game so someone else could use the Switch. What a fool I was to share!
The Case of the Golden Idol only has one active save file at any given time, and it auto-saves. The Nintendo Switch version also, unfortunately, auto-deletes if you exit out of the game. I didn’t realize it was a bug, at first, and thought I had simply reset my game by accident. Another time, my Switch had to “close the program because of an error” and I again went through a large portion of the game all over again. I and many other players experienced this pain, and we learned to not leave.
Regaining progress with the bugged version of The Case of the Golden Idol is incredibly laborious. The Case of the Golden Idol is a point-and-click adventure game. You can’t just put in your answers in the missing blanks; instead, you have to move around the map picking up the clues and then filling them in. There are also dozens of answers to fill in, especially as the game gets harder.
Now, when I first played the game, I found this gameplay relatively charming. However, even if you know the answers, this process quickly becomes tedious and, for the full game, can take upwards of an hour. Over the summer, I finally finished my playthrough of The Case of the Golden Idol, though I had to re-do my in-game answers at least three times, spending hours of precious gaming time filling in answers.
Color Gray Has Launched Two DLCs, But No Patch for The Case of the Golden Idol on Switch
In the months since, Color Gray Games has launched two DLCs for The Case of the Golden Idol. I wanted to support the studio, so I bought the first. I logged in to play the DLC, only to find that apparently I couldn’t start them unless I had a completed main save file. Well, okay. I spent an hour doing so again… only to find that that didn’t work either. What a pain. (Yes, at this point, I had refilled in my answers on Golden Idol at least half a dozen times.)
FINE, I thought, I’ll just wait until it’s fixed.
In August, patch notes started making their way around the internet that Color Gray had fixed this issue. Then, the developers promised in a Tweet that they were handling it. So, understandably, I thought that by the end of October, everything should have been fine. A few days ago, I set off to travel, downloaded the update, and was excited to play the DLC, even accepting I was going to have to burn through yet another save file.
Reader, you already know what’s coming. After filling answers across the game’s 11 chapters, which I’ve done hundreds of times now, I got to the menu… only to find I still could not access the Spider of Sri Lanka DLC. And, when I checked the main game again, I received a title menu I’ve come to dread: Prologue…
A Save Is No Small Thing
As of October 16, 2023, the save-breaking bug is still a problem on the Nintendo Switch version of The Case of the Golden Idol. This is really frustrating. It’s been five months since the game released on Switch, and Color Gray has released a second DLC, The Lemurian Vampire, rather than solve for the save-breaking bug.
Look, I get it. Fixing a massive problem you weren’t expecting is probably nowhere near as fun as making new content. However, a save-breaking bug is not a simple error. This is a core quality-of-life issue for a game, and it’s really frustrating. It’s making me not want to bother logging back into play the DLCs when it’s even possible to do so, which is a bummer because the DLC could be genuinely awesome!
It’s hard to recommend a game that can shut down at any moment and cause players to lose hours of progress. It’s a compliment to the game’s writing and quality gameplay that I was willing to experience the tedium of repeating myself so many times, but even this detective has to draw the line somewhere.
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Editor’s note: Since we’ve published this, readers have posted in the comments with workarounds and ideas.
9 Comments
Let me save your life: I found out on Reddit (thanks to a very generous contributor) that Color Gray put in place a workaround for this problem. In the scenario selection screens, you can press the minus button together with the Y button to mark a scenario as completed. It doesn’t auto-fill the scenario for you, but it allows you to skip it.
That being said, this is a terrible bug that most definitely should have been fixed immediately. Releasing DLC without fixing this bug was a nasty move on their part. But the game is so good, that it’s worth biting the bullet.
Thanks you, you save my life 🙂
For anyone reading this in the future, I entered the minus-Y combination on the last chapter of the Spider of Lanka DLC (to deal with a bug where the word “hatch” had become unselectable, preventing me from finishing that chapter), and *** IT REMOVED ALL MY PROGRESS ON THE MAIN GAME ***.
This also made it impossible for me to play either of the two DLCs — when I try to start them, it starts the main game instead and puts me at the first chapter. So I think at this point I’ll have to redo the entire main game just to play the Lemurian Vampire DLC.
The save bug is bad, and this “workaround” is just as bad. Totally inexcusable.
What a trainwreck. It’s wild that they didn’t fix those bugs yet.
Question: now that you’re starting from scratch, cannot you use the minus-Y trick to automatically “complete” all the chapters in the main game, thus unlocking the DLC again? I think that’s what I did when I originally got stuck. I had to do it on each and every chapter, but it worked for me.
I couldn’t initially (after it deleted all my progress) — as I said, when I tried to run either DLC it would just start the first case of the main game instead, even after I did minus-Y on every main game chapter. It’s like the game was in some weird interim corrupted state.
To get around that problem I actually had to do “Restart all progress” to nuke the entire save file and then do the minus-Y trick on all the main game chapters. That has at least let me start the second DLC, but until I start playing it I won’t know if the DLC saves are actually stable (I’m not confident anymore now that I know the minus-Y trick doesn’t affect just the current chapter but can affect all other progress in the game).
Just wanted to make sure people know that using minus-Y on even just one chapter when you have no other save problems can result in losing all progress. It’s great to have that workaround for people who already have save corruption, but having it cause even worse save corruption on my otherwise mostly-ok save file was a real kick in the pants.
I can imagine how painful it was. Sorry if my attempt to help resulted in even more of a mess.
I can only tell you that the Lemurian Vampire DLC is worth the trouble. Even better than the first DLC, IMHO.
What also helped me: in the Settings off the game’s main menu screen is a toggle option called “Save game when toggling thinking panel”. Since I already lost my progress (a couple of times) and had nothing to lose, I tried toggling this off. So far, on DLC at least, my game is still saving when I bring up and then close the thinking panel, and I am not having trouble accessing the DLC or losing progress, even when I switch to another game. I tried this AFTER I went through the “mark case as solved” option mentioned above, no idea if they’re related. Love the game, very bummed about this bug!
I was just about to bite the bullet and buy it again on Steam, because I love the game but I’m so tired of this save bug. I will try this trick, thank you! I have tried to contact the developer on Twitter, but they do not respond to questions about the Switch version. They have made a great game, but I don’t like their buisness practice.
I hope it works for you!