Classic adventure titles from Sierra On-Line were my gateway into PC gaming, lo those many years ago. Sierra was so fascinating to me – like the studio system of Old Hollywood, it had its roster of star designers, and they cranked out one iconic franchise after the other.
The (in)famous text parser interface used in these games taught me how to type, and type quickly – if you didn’t get the correct command entered in time, your character could meet any number of unfortunate and abrupt ends. The EGA palette remains the platonic ideal of adventuring to me, and those AGI and SCI engine classics still hold sway over my imagination even after all this time.
It was with this background that I was especially excited to hear about 2024’s The Crimson Diamond. Created by artist and solo developer Julia Minamata, it is a paean to those Sierra releases, especially Roberta Williams’s The Colonel’s Bequest. It is, remarkably, a modern release with a text parser interface, lush EGA graphics, and an intriguing period mystery.
When I decided to start tackling my backlog, it was the natural place to start.
To my great excitement, it is absolutely fantastic. The achievement is remarkable – aside from the music, which is composed by Dan Policar, Minamata conceived and fashioned the entire game herself. Which is something, when you consider that this would be considered a AAA release back in the day. And despite being a loving throwback to those times, it also features a lot of quality-of-life improvements to remove some of the bugaboos which give the genre a bit of a reputation for modern players.
The story begins in the wilds of 1914 Ontario, when a fisherman cuts open his latest catch to find a massive diamond. This draws the eyes of the nation to the sparsely-populated ghost town of Crimson, which has been left mostly abandoned after its booming garnet mines went bust. Will the find spur a new boom for the region? And do the inhabitants actually want a wave of fortune-seekers to descend on their quiet community?
Sent to investigate is Nancy Maple, an aspiring mineralogist who is working as a clerk at the Royal Canadian Museum in Toronto. An enthusiastic rockhound, Nancy is eager to prove herself to her superiors and just generally excited to see what’s up in Crimson. But things don’t turn out as expected, and Nancy finds herself stranded at the once-prosperous Crimson Lodge in a house full of strangers with less-than-obvious motives.
Soon there’s a mystery to solve, plots to unravel, motives to discern, evidence to collect, and lots of conversations to eavesdrop on. The geology-minded Nancy happily switches into sleuth mode, intent on getting to the bottom of all the intrigue, and the game is afoot.
This is a really, really fun game. Nancy is a great and likable character; a total rock nerd who peppers her dialogue with facts about Canadian geology, she’s earnest and kind and very clever. The cast of other characters is great too; some are gruff, some unpleasant, and some sympathetic. Figuring out what each is truly after and sorting out agendas is key to solving the mysteries of Crimson.
The mechanisms by which Nancy goes about her investigation are really interesting and compelling; sure, she has to collect fingerprints for every person in the house, but the means by which each individual’s prints are collected is different. There’s a lot of variety in the puzzles, which keeps things from getting monotonous.
There’s a lot going on in the Crimson Lodge – Nancy is always stumbling upon overheard conversations or cutscene events. It’s likely you won’t encounter them all in one playthrough, which not only enhances replayability but also adds a bit of challenge. Again, Minimata impresses here by giving multiple ways to suss out critical plot points, and there are often multiple possible solutions to puzzles. It’s really remarkable.
The EGA graphics are impeccable, cozy and moody by turns, and the music, while not omnipresent throughout the game, is very effective and even catchy when used. Of the legacy elements of gameplay, I was perhaps most impressed by the parser interface. This isn’t King’s Quest, here. The parser is remarkably fluent and flexible, accepting a variety of commands and synonyms in a way that the oldies did not. Occasionally I did get hung up trying to figure out the proper wording to get it to do something, and the inability to use “USE” was frustrating, but its batting average was much higher than old Sierra titles.
The improved parser is only one of many quality improvements made for the modern age. Autosaves are helpful in sticky situations, even though Nancy rarely finds herself in real peril; Crimson Diamond does away with the arbitrary and capricious deaths for which Sierra was notorious, and you have to do something pretty chuckleheaded to meet your maker here. It certainly is less anxiety-inducing of an experience for that reason.
That’s not to say the game isn’t without its fiddly bits. You get different results if you “EXAMINE” an object than if you “LOOK” at it, and this leads to a lot of redundancy; you can also miss important clues if you forget to do both to an object in the correct order. Sometimes, such as during the fingerprint search, you have to do these commands multiple times on the same object.
It would also have been nice to be able to physically manipulate or combine inventory objects with the cursor, especially as you get towards the end of the game and have pockets full of various rock samples that you have to interact with in very specific and sequential ways to unlock all the information you’ll need to succeed. It can get to be a lot to remember, and it’s easy to miss things if you don’t know exactly what the game is after. These are minor complaints, though, and far from some of the infamous puzzle solutions of yore (cough Rumpelstiltskin cough).
But even the fact that it can be easy to miss some things is an element in the game’s favor, as it’s intensely replayable. There are multiple possible resolutions and endings to the story, and you can opt in to getting clues as to what you might have missed. It certainly made me want to go back and see what critical clues or pieces of evidence I had missed in trying to solve – and prove! – the many mysteries of Crimson.
All in all, The Crimson Diamond is a compelling and cozy mystery yarn. It’s well-written and intriguing, full of fun characters and interesting action. It looks great, it sounds great, and the fact that it’s essentially a single-person project is mindboggling. Minamata has done something really amazing here, and I can’t wait to see what’s next. I’m certainly eager for more Nancy Maple adventures.
You can find out more about The Crimson Diamond and its creator here; Minamata is active on social media and Twitch, so catch her there too. The Crimson Diamond is available on a number of popular platforms, but I prefer GOG as my shop of choice.
Check this one out, folks. It’s a ton of fun.