Every morning I look through my email and see various announcements from game developers, publishers, and PR firms. There's always lots of news about expansions, season passes, release dates, events, game updates, betas, etc., and they're almost always perfectly straightforward: a few paragraphs of text, a trailer, and a link to the Steam page, website, or press kit.

Almost always. Today I received an email that was a bit different. Not from the game's publicist, but from a character in the game, hinting at a mystery to be solved later this month:

Dear Associate,

Seven Seas Company has reviewed and approved your request to participate in the upcoming Lanka Trade Expedition. You and two other associates will be personally accompanied on this mission.

Part of the itinerary includes. [Albert Cloudley is a character in the original mystery adventure and the best detective game of 2022, The Golden Idol Case (open in new tab). There is no trailer or link to the appropriate press release, and the "partial itinerary" is the image below, which shows an intimidating figure in a devil mask holding a lantern. The word "April" is scrawled on the wall above it.

Time for some detective work! I asked my PC Gamer colleagues if they had received the email via Slack, but none had. (In fact, they were so busy with other topics that they completely ignored my question.) So I searched Twitter for recent references to the "Golden Idol incident."

I saw that Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier had received the same email and image (opens in new tab) as I had. However, Destructoid senior news reporter Eric Van Allen received a slightly different image (opens in new tab) in his email. The image shows the same person, but holding a lamp against a wall, where the number 27 can be seen.

There is a little more. The image in the email was marked "2023," which indicates that this is happening this year. The third image Polygon found shows a person holding up a lantern and illuminating a clock on the wall, with the hands showing the time as 10:00.

This means that on April 27, 2023, at 10:00 Pacific Time (here we assume morning, not afternoon), something new in The Golden Idol Affair will begin. Neat! That mystery was easier to solve than any other in the game, but still great news. It looks like a new case (or hopefully several new cases) will be announced later this month. Stay tuned for an official announcement and a new trailer. In the meantime, you can still try out a free demo of the game on Steam (opens in a new tab).