If you ask me, 2024 has been a fairly dire year for big, mainstream games. Of course there have been a few gems in that space, but most that I’ve played have felt overly safe, or focused on gameplay ideas that I don’t think are successful. Against this backdrop, however, some “smaller” games have really shined, and one of the most memorable of those is The Crimson Diamond, an old-school, text-parser-based adventure game with EGA graphics that are simultaneously gorgeous—drawn with a remarkable attention to detail and bursting with vivid and expressive color and animation—and also look like something you might have played in 1987.
Existing in the same lineage as classic Sierra adventures like The Colonel’s Bequest, The Crimson Diamond casts you as Nancy Maple, a young museum clerk in early-20th-century Toronto with a fierce interest in geology, who seizes an opportunity to travel north to the small town of Crimson to investigate the discovery of a massive diamond. Nancy gets more than she bargained for, however, when the guests at the isolated lodge where she’s staying start dropping dead, and what was a geological inquiry turns into a murder investigation.
What I think makes The Crimson Diamond so effective, in addition to its enthralling mystery and gorgeous visuals, is the way that it reclaims the largely discarded device of the text parser, which vanished from mainstream adventure game design following the popularization of graphical, point-and-click interfaces. It turns out, as designer Julia Minamata so effectively demonstrates here, that the text parser can still be a wonderful device that facilitates deeply engaged gameplay, encouraging different ways of thinking about and interacting with your environment than you might if you were relying on the limited verbs of a point-and-click game.
In combination with the fun, Agatha-Christie-style murder mystery that powers the game’s plot—one filled with colorful characters, all of whom have their own desires, agendas, and motivations—the text parser here, despite being an “old” convention of adventure game design, feels fresh and invigorated, which strangely makes The Crimson Diamond feel more bold and forward-thinking than many of the “modern,” big-budget games I’ve played this year — Carolyn Petit
