In my mind, this image slowly comes into place, with the text coming last.
Julia Minamata
A text parser? Typing “Open drawer”, then “Look in drawer”, then “Take brochures”, in the year 2024, on a computer that can generate a 4K 3D model of the Acropolis if I ask it to? Is that really what I mean? The Crimson Diamond ask us?
Yes, that's true, and solo developer/writer/producer Julia Minamata is right to ask the question. If you have Sierra's text adventures in your mental library (like, for example, The Colonel's Legacyor if you are willing to meet the analyzer halfway, it will work. The Crimson DiamondThe parser is quite agile, accepting a range of nouns and verbs in most circumstances. You can still use the arrow keys and a mouse to move around and click for a few useful shortcuts. And the parser has shortcuts, like typing “n” to check your quest log or “od” or “oc” for the very common actions of opening a door or cupboard.
This game has a lot of closets and drawers, as it is set in Northern Ontario, Canada in 1914. You play as Nancy Maple, a young geologist eager for field work, sent by your museum to the mining town of Crimson to investigate a diamond that fell from the guts of a river fish. Everything goes wrong on your journey, and you must investigate this town, its strange inhabitants and visitors, and ultimately a crime that may or may not have something to do with potential diamonds.
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The tutorial room does a great job of introducing you to the control scheme: arrow keys or mouse cursor for movement and selection, but typing for the actual action.
Julia Minamata
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You spend a lot of time in the lodge, chatting, looking and picking up little things that you know you'll use later.
Julia Minamata
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The cutscenes give the artist new angles to demonstrate his remarkable EGA prowess.
Julia Minamata
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The characters in this game are richer than you might remember from the days of more limited memory, and usually have more than one note.
Julia Minamata
A few revelations need to be made. For one, Minamata designed EGA style social avatar for Ars senior AI reporter Benj Edwards, who tipped me off to the game. Another reason is that the game costs $15 on Steam Or Itch.io (and 10 percent off on Steam during that first week after release), was made by a solo Canadian developer, with music by Dan Policar, a particularly cool keyboard playerand this brings to mind some of my early pre-Maniac-Mansion Adventure game memories. I haven't played the game all the way through either. I'm not going to look at it with a critical magnifying glass, I just think more people should know about it.
Release Trailer for The Crimson Diamond.
Let's put aside nostalgia and feelings of encouragement towards the underdogs, The Crimson Diamond The rendering is superb and the sound is excellent. The creative constraints of an EGA-like color palette and pixel block size made for some scenes that were simply wonderful to watch. (EGA was IBM's Enhanced Graphics Adapter for PCs in the 80s.) The soundtrack loops in a pleasant and sometimes catchy way. Alice Bell at Rock Paper Shotgun played much further in this (about six hours and almost done), and its main complaint is almost a throwback: a few puzzles with obscure solutions, far too easy to miss with the text analysis and EGA graphics.
I'm looking forward to seeing where Nancy Maple's journey takes her, even if I sometimes have to rack my brain to find the text that fits the obvious. So far, the game has felt like spending time in one of those non-violent mysteries you see on PBS (or CBC), but in a familiar and evocative form of gameplay.
List image by Julia Minamata
