Crimson Diamond is a true old-school puzzle adventure. It’s 2D pixel art with a circumscribed color palette like the EGA games, and you control it with a text parser like King’s Quest or one of those other Sierra adventures that old-timers like Graham remember. It’s significant to mention this up front, because it’s very likely that despite Crimson Diamond’s tales of treason, murder, and mineral rights in 1914 Canada, the text parser element will be a Rubicon you won’t want to cross right away. That’s not an unreasonable position to take – although I think the text parser in Crimson Diamond is fantastic. My beef with this adventure game is the specifics required to solve some of the puzzles.
If you’re not familiar, there’s a tutorial, but basically the text parser means you don’t press buttons, you just type. Type LOOK — although you don’t have to operate all caps, I’m just doing it so this review isn’t a text parsing nightmare — and hit enter, and the game will give you a text box describing the room you’re in. It might be, say, “an old study with a large carved fireplace. There’s a tapestry to the right of the fireplace, a display case to the left, and a desk in the middle of the room.”
Then you go to the desk and type LOOK AT DESK, and the game tells you that the desk has two drawers, a set of pens and ink, a green lamp, and a tissue paper. EXAMINE BLOTTER, and you’ll learn that it’s green leather worn polished from years of operate. As I said, this may seem tedious to you at first, but The Crimson Diamond has a really good list of shortcuts, like “a ab” for ASK ABOUT when you’re talking to someone, or using SEARCH to look through the entire dresser at once, instead of OPEN DRAWER for each drawer and LOOK IN DRAWER separately. Although you can do that if you want. The parser also takes a ton of input into account (it accepts BIN for TRASH CAN, for example), and it’s impressive to play around with.
While I’m impressed, I admit that there are times when the parser needs a particularly specific output, and the verb USE doesn’t really come into play here, even when it seems natural, ahem, to operate it. You can POUR A KITCHEN INTO A POT, but you can’t USE A HAMMER ON A SCALE. And then there are times when the answer is disarmingly plain. I got stuck for a while because I was trying to break off a tiny piece of ice in the fridge when I should have just PICK UP THE ICE. But still! I think the parser is great, and I especially like the distinction between LOOK and EXAMINE. There’s even a shortcut to exiting a room through the nearest exit, and each character has a two-letter code for the parser.
There are eight characters in total, not counting the player character Nancy Maple, a Canadian amateur geologist who really wants to investigate. Nancy’s goal of fieldwork leads her to Crimson, Ontario, where a giant diamond has been found in the belly of a fish. Nancy is trapped in the Crimson Lodge, where landowner Ethan (EE) and his up-to-date girlfriend Margot (MM) live with cook and general helper Jack (JJ) and Native American handyman Nathan (NN), whose family has ancestral rights to the land on which the resort sits. But Nathan’s sister Nessa (SS) has shown up with her lawyer Corvus (CC) to challenge Ethan’s claim to the resort (and also suggest that Margot is a whore). Meanwhile, Kimi (KK) is there to check on a colony of occasional cormorants, and Albert (AA) is an official geologist sent by the government to see if there are any diamonds in the Crimson River.
Several characters are interested in finding the diamonds, while others would rather not. And when a character who is seemingly unrelated to the diamonds is killed, Nancy becomes a reluctant detective. Although, to be sincere, not that reluctant. She seems to get used to it quickly, and starts eavesdropping on her first night, when the only possible threat is that she and Kimi can’t get home on the train and are invited to spend the night at a luxury cottage. Nancy is a Canadian superheroine whose power is EAVING THROUGH GLASS DOORS.
The game’s early chapters focus on more respectable geology, and you have to find the tools Nancy needs for her makeshift field kit—how do you get an ice pick out of a frozen cooler? How do you get Kimi away from a cliff face so you can get a rock sample?—and puzzles like that. Later, they get more convoluted, like a puzzle where you have to get a fingerprint sample from everyone, using methods as diverse as mixing balmy wax with cookie dough or just, you know, asking.
After the murder, there are a few tiny plot twists where you can eavesdrop on people, but only if you approach them from the right angle or miss the conversations entirely because you chose to follow someone else. Later on, you’ll come across puzzles that you may not know the answers to because, for example, you didn’t find the key and what it unlocks in previous chapters. The puzzles are largely fun and well-conceived, and The Crimson Diamond has some convoluted paths to follow – sometimes literally – and thoughtful callbacks as the events at the cottage pile up.
The cottage itself is really well designed, with two floors of rooms that are designed to be memorable, whether it’s the patterned and garish wallpaper like a William Morris x Liberace crossover, or the mystery that’s haunting you (the will definitely has to be in the study!). The outside area, on the other hand, is a bit more of a maze, with lots of outhouses to stumble upon, but that makes it more hazardous. The EGA-style art works beautifully both inside and out though. And in fact, Nancy can fall into the river and drown instantly in the grand tradition of water-loving game characters everywhere, so be careful outside.
So overall, I’m a fan. But there are a few places where the puzzles throw you off balance with a plain solution that still feels a little unfair. One situation that may haunt me to my deathbed involved having to operate clear glue. I glued every character, racked my brain, went completely the wrong way, and ended up just searching every piece of furniture in every room with a net, at which point I found a roll of plasters in the drawer by the bed. No one said they had plasters! The plasters were not perceptible in the pixelated rendering of the room! How was I supposed to know where to look for the plasters? I swear the plasters took me at least an hour out of my 6-year-old games.
I wouldn’t normally be so specific about the puzzles, but this moment was less Crimson Diamond and more White Whale that I wouldn’t want to see anyone else chase. Other than that, I think Crimson Diamond is a pretty piece of work, combining a love letter to the past with a contemporary implementation, all wrapped up in a mystery that may not have huge, shocking twists but remains engaging throughout. And there are bonus geological facts, too! Consider PLAYING THIS GAME.
This review is based on a test version of the game provided by the game developer.
