Nancy Maple spent only a few minutes in the Crimson Lodge before I killed her. Crimson Diamond. A mineralogist who works as a clerk for the Royal Canadian Museum, she has spent hours on a train heading deep into the Canadian wilderness, searching for diamonds. I thought she might like a shower. So I whisk Nancy through the Crimson Lodge, checking out rooms and occasionally saying hello to other guests. I find a bathroom with a tub and shower, maneuver Nancy past her, and type Take a shower. It doesn’t work because Nancy is fully dressed. I’m writing Undressand Nancy won’t do it because the door is open. That makes sense! I show Nancy the door. Close the door. Now Undress. Back in the shower, pecking Open the water valve on my keyboard. Switch to shower. Now Nancy can come in.
But for that, Crimson Diamond cuts from a different angle, Nancy’s silhouette behind the shower curtain. The music changes. Anyone who’s seen a horror movie knows what’s coming—the door handle shakes. The door opens. Nancy is stabbed to death. I forgot to lock the door.
Crimson DiamondWith programmer and illustrator Julia Minamatais a game about precision. Not precision in movement, but precision in words. Minamata’s first solo game uses a text parser to control the action. (Except for Nancy herself; she moves with a mouse click or the arrow keys.) This is a feature common in games of the 80s and early 90s; Sierra On-Line is known for text parser games such as The King’s Task AND The Colonel’s Note: The Laura Bow MysteryInstead of pointing and clicking in these games, you type in commands. If you want Nancy to eat a rock, you type Eat a stone. (Although he may not do it.)
“You don’t see a lot of games with text analyzers these days,” Minamata told Polygon. “I wouldn’t say it surprised me, but at the same time, we live in a society where we’re texting and texting all the time. It’s something that’s constant. We’re constantly interacting with each other and with the written word. I love that way of interacting with a game. It just feels like the possibilities are endless.”
Photo: Julia Minamata
This is where precision in language comes in. Even the slightest change in a word will change what happens. You can look around the room, but what if you examine something? And, as I learned, what if you close the door but don’t lock it? Nancy’s near-instant murder—which in turn caused me to start over from my last save—was the perfect lesson I needed to understand Crimson Diamond and what it asked of me.
The game begins with Nancy Maple hopping a train to a remote Ontario resort to investigate a mysterious diamond cut from the belly of a fish. Diamonds aren’t common in the area, or so they say, so a few other people also arrive: family members of the resort owners who want to collect their inheritance, a curious Japanese-Canadian ornithologist (a tribute to the Minamata family’s history in Canada, she says), and a government geologist. Everyone expects it to be a quick trip, but a bridge explosion suddenly strands them all at the resort with its grumpy owner, staff, and the owner’s wife. Chaos ensues—both with family drama, the history of the failed mining town, a death (not Nancy!), and, of course, a diamond.
Crimson Diamond is split into seven different chapters, most of which take place in and around the Crimson Lodge. Over the course of a few hours, you’ll get to know the characters and their stories very well, both as individuals and in terms of how their stories play into the larger mystery. Nancy becomes a de facto detective, piecing everything together. One of the first mysteries is a robbery: someone has stolen an steep brooch and a few tankards. This is Nancy’s first foray into detective work; to do this, you’ll need to find makeshift tools to dust and do fingerprinting before you find the culprit. You’ll need to get fingerprints from everyone in the house, some of which are as straightforward as just asking, but others require more thought and foresight, like feeding a man a cookie so salty he’ll need a drink — an action that requires him to touch the glass, from which you can later lift a fingerprint.
Photo: Julia Minamata
The game quickly becomes more sophisticated and multi-layered, but Minamata said she didn’t want Crimson Diamond be punishing, as early text parsers could be. (If you get stuck, Minamata has made a full guide with tips available online; there’s no way to just get so stuck that you have to stop playing.) The parser itself is a bit more tolerant with words, for example. You can’t accidentally progress through the game in a way that makes you miss significant clues. There are no straightforward, sudden deaths The Colonel’s Recordsor. “It’s something you have to earn,” Minamata said. “My kind of puzzle is the idea of something so simple that you would think you would do in real life, but for some reason it just slips our mind during the game. But if you do it, you’re rewarded, Hey, you survived the shower this time.”
These fixes do nothing Crimson Diamond straightforward, anyway, but they reduce frustration by allowing you to really delve into the world and enjoy it—not fear it.
Crimson Diamond was released on August 15 for Mac and Windows PC. The game was reviewed on Windows PC using a pre-download code provided by Julia Minamata. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased through affiliate links. Additional information on Polygon’s ethics policy can be found here.
