THE CRIMSON DIAMOND

The Crimson Diamond (hereafter TCD) by Julia Minamata is a special, for our time, third-person adventure game. Special in at least two aspects.

The first concerns the technical area, including controls. While it's been quite common for many years to release point and click adventure games with a style reminiscent of 1992-1997, TCD takes us even further back in time, back when Sierra's EGA graphics (new, duckduckgo it) quest adventures were the order of the day.

And along with the EGA graphics, hand in hand goes the controls, i.e. the text-parser user interface. If you don't know what that is, you don't belong to the age or even niche interest group that The Crimson Diamond is mainly aimed at. But since this in no way means that the game is excluded from attracting new players, I'll explain: in the animated adventure genre (that's the term IBM commissioned Sierra to use) that Sierra Online's King's Quest 1 established in 1984 (!), you couldn't manipulate the character or interact with the environment with the mouse. Movement was done with the keyboard arrow keys and interaction was done by typing direct commands, just as it was done in the even older genre of text adventures. To give an example, to pick up an apple, you typed "take apple" (and prayed that what you saw turned out to be a pear, for which you didn't know the English word at the time, nothing, something of mine). And that's exactly the same for The Crimson Diamond - you can also scroll with the mouse pointer, which didn't work for me in the end, keyboard arrows all the way.

I admit that I didn't expect that in 2024 I would have to comment on the parser of the adventure game I'm presenting, but life is full of surprises. The quality of a text parser is mainly characterized by the range of words it understands, as well as the syntactic complexity of the commands it can execute. In the very old days, even "look at clothes" was beyond the capabilities of the average text adventurer, "look clothes" was understood and we were still happy. Since then, of course, a lot of water has flowed down the drain, and the parsers of modern text adventures (yes, the genre may well be commercially extinct, but there is an active and rich freeware indie scene) are much smarter - and The Crimson Diamond has learned from that. It includes most shortcuts (like "x" for examine, "l" for look, "o" for open") and functions like F3 or spacebar to repeat command (very useful when you have to search 8 different drawers), and has no trouble with commands like "rub cliff rock sample on ruby brooch". Good addition that I don't remember from the classic text parser adventures is that commands like "open door" will move Nancy near the door by themselves - if there are 2 or more doors, of course, either you have to get more specific or move yourself.   

And to close the technical section, music and sound effects also follow 1990's techniques and patterns, while speech is completely absent.

The second reason why I consider the TCD special is that it is a homage to a particular Sierra game, which despite its quality, never achieved the status of the rest of the company's series. I'm referring to 1989's The Colonel's Bequest, also known as Laura Bow 1, after the name of the protagonist journalist. What made that adventure stand out was that it was purely investigation-focused, with intelligence gathering, often finding a way to eavesdrop on conversations, being the main way to advance the story, and being in the right place at the right time was also very important. There were very few inventory based puzzles or puzzles. And it was possible to complete the main game having missed important information of the overall plot. This is exactly the formula The Crimson Diamond follows, with a few quality of life changes since it's been almost thirty-five years since the release of The Colonel's Bequest.

The Crimson Diamond takes us to Ontario, Canada in the year 1914. In the remote and remote Crimson region, a simple fisherman makes a startling discovery. While cleaning a fish, he finds a huge diamond in his stomach. A mine of the semi-precious stone garnet was formerly in operation in the area, but there was never any evidence of diamonds. The event is gaining publicity and attracting the interest of many different groups, from the academic community to financial bigwigs.

We take on the character of Nancy Maple. Nancy is a secretary at the Royal Canadian Museum, but her great passion is mineralogy (I'm not judging) and her dream is to be accepted as a student in the relevant faculty at the University, where of course in 1914 women were counted on one hand. She learns the story about the diamond, and asks the supportive Professor Plummer to let her do a mineralogical survey of the Crimson area, which if positively reviewed by the department could be her ticket to the school. After his positive response, she packs her bags for her first excursion outside the city of Toronto, and takes the train for the fairly long journey to Crimson. A few days of careful work could change her entire life. What could go wrong? Already on the train, she meets a very nice woman, Kimi, who has the same destination but for a completely different reason, bird watching.

The arrival at the Crimson Train Station, however, is episodic. Nancy's suitcase containing her entire mineralogy kit has disappeared, and without it she can't do her research. At the same time, Nancy and Kimi meet another visitor to the area, Albert, who has come for exactly the same reason as Nancy, except that he has an official government commission for a mineralogical investigation into the existence of diamonds, and treats the ladies with disdain. And on top of that, bad news. Jack, the man in charge of all the business at The Crimson Lodge, arrives, but has only been informed of Albert's arrival. What's worse is that the owner, Evan Richards, has discontinued the operation of the resort as a hotel for the public months ago, and at the same time he's a man who wants his privacy and doesn't take kindly to the stir that the possible discovery of diamonds will surely bring to the area. Still, Jack has the common decency not to leave Nancy and Kimi alone in the black darkness of the train station, and offers them at least one night at the Crimson Lodge, and then we'll see.

All this, just in the introduction of the game! From there, the young and inexperienced but smart and energetic Nancy will find herself embroiled in a classic Agatha Christie-style manor mystery, where multiple characters with different and conflicting motives and goals pursue their secret agendas - and things get a lot more serious when the train bridge connecting Crimson to the outside world is knocked out by sabotage, while back at the Lodge a death occurs from unclear, but certainly suspicious, causes. Nancy never imagined that she would have to unravel a case with huge stakes in terms of grand legacies, environmental consequences, indigenous peoples' territorial rights, justice, and even the course of international political developments!

The Crimson Diamond follows the recipe of The Colonel's Bequest almost to the letter. A pure investigative adventure based on gathering information through eavesdropping and opening drawers and suitcases that don't belong to us. The key quality of life change to mention is that it's not cramped in terms of requiring you to be in the right place at the right time. There is no clock that just as the time passes, so goes the opportunity. If and when Nancy is thorough in visiting available locations before taking any action that advances the story (and that is always clear), the available scenes are there waiting for her.

At the same time, as in The Colonel's Bequest, the main story can be completed even in the absence of important plot elements. This certainly gives both flexibility and replay value to the title, areas in which adventure games often fall short against other genres.

There are also several classic inventory based puzzles. Most of them won't strain the experienced adventurer, with the possible exception of collecting Jack's fingerprint, an essential item for the game's continuity, perhaps the only point that can stick with the player for a while.

The meat of the game, the fun on offer, the overall experience, is a bit hard to evaluate for something that is so out of the mainstream. You could say that what matters in a mystery adventure is the mystery and endings - and here TCD does well, with interesting characters, developments, twists and turns and satisfying endings - yes, there are 4 more or less different ones depending on some decisions the player makes. Perhaps the biggest negative at this point is that the careful player will figure out what's going on with Margot long before Nancy does.

On the other hand, computer games for better or worse are neither movies nor books, so they can be truly timeless no matter the technological advancement of the medium over the course of almost 40 years, from when high resolution was 640×200 pixels to the ray-traced present. TCD will hit a certain audience right in the feels. For the rest of us? I belong (very marginally, I got into PC gaming when VGA was already prevalent, but I also played the EGA quest games in my early teens) to the target audience, so I don't have an answer, certainly not for everyone - the technical aspect of The Crimson Diamond is not hidden though, everyone can decide for themselves by watching the trailer.  

TCD is impeccable in terms of achieving the goal Julia Minamata set for herself, the creation of the spiritual successor to The Colonel's Bequest - it's no coincidence that Roberta Williams herself has a rare public seal of approval (now don't ask a newcomer who she is, I won't stand for it). She gets it right in the design, she gets it right in the technical area - because using EGA graphics that are simultaneously watchable is not easy, but to do it in a way that transports those who lived through those gaming times 30 years ago is an achievement. It's also an achievement that limits The Crimson Diamond's audience - which is perhaps a shame because it's a worthwhile adventure game that in terms of design and story could be enjoyed by anyone. On the other hand, not everything has to be for everyone, and I'm glad to see good games being released that cater to niche audiences that want (and) different from the mainstream.

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