Play on: Couple
Current goal: Solve an old-fashioned puzzle
A few weeks ago I mentioned how I was enchanted Not awardedpoint-and-click adventure from the folks at Wadjet Eye. Well, I finished it (it was great) just in time for a completely up-to-date entry in the genre to appear. And while Wadjet Eye’s game is most reminiscent of the adventure games of the ’90s, which featured full voice acting and elegant drag-and-drop interfaces, this up-to-date game, Crimson Diamond from designer Julia Minamata, is inspired by an earlier era of adventures, those that were in EGA and required you to type in what you wanted your character to do. I can’t wait to discover its secrets.
Crimson Diamond is probably most reminiscent of Sierra’s adventures, especially the Clara Bow games, in which their plucky heroine found herself drawn into crime puzzles during the Roaring ’20s. casts you in the role of Nancy Maple, a newborn woman investigating the discovery of an extremely enormous and valuable diamond in a town in northern Ontario, Canada. From the trailer, it’s clear that her investigation will bring her into contact with people with their own motives, some of which are sinister, and will land her in no tiny amount of danger. Sign me up!
People often talk about the evolution of adventure games from text parsers to purely graphical interfaces as a net good, as if text parsers were just a crutch, a relic from the genre’s early days that we no longer needed, but I’ve always seen them as two fundamentally different approaches, each with its own strengths. I think there are ways in which the presence of a text parser can encourage original thinking that a purely graphical interface doesn’t always allow, in addition to immersing yourself in the story. Crimson DiamondI can’t wait to see how it will utilize this design element that is so rarely seen in state-of-the-art games. All in all, it sounds like the perfect solution for a cozy weekend. —Caroline Petit
