As a big detective game fan, my one dream for this subgenre is a game with little to no hand-holding. You are simply presented with evidence and people to interview and are let loose on the scene to reach your own theory and conclusion. The closest thing I’ve found to this so far is EQ Studios’ The Painscreek Killings, closely followed by their second game, Scene Investigators. While solo developer Julia Minamata’s The Crimson Diamond doesn’t fill this spot exactly, it still gives you a hell of a lot of control over your investigation into the goings on at Crimson Lodge.
The Crimson Diamond is an adventure mystery game that uses 1980s-style EGA graphics and text parser gameplay to create a truly unique retro experience. We play as Nancy Maple, an aspiring mineralogist who works at the Royal Canadian Museum in Toronto. After a large diamond is discovered in the belly of a fish in the remote town of Crimson, Ontario, Nancy immediately volunteers to travel there to investigate in hopes of the chance to improve the museum’s mineralogy exhibit and in turn, be offered the chance to study at the university. During her investigation, Nancy stays at the Crimson Lodge, owned by Evan Richardson. What Nancy doesn’t know is that her stay will involve more than investigating the area for potential diamonds, as there’s a family drama brewing and more, setting up the perfect Agatha Christie-style mystery plot which isn’t a match against Nancy and her expert eavesdropping.
The gameplay of The Crimson Diamond involves using the text parser mechanic to give Nancy commands, collect evidence in whatever quest or investigation Nancy currently has going on, and make certain investigation choices to determine whether you’re progressing with enough evidence or not. In The Crimson Diamond, thoroughness is key, so if you’re the type of player who only does the bare minimum to complete the game, you will get very little out of the story. One of the things that intrigued me the most about The Crimson Diamond is that it does allow you to progress by only doing the most basic investigating, and leaves it up to your own initiative and interest in the case to gather further information and evidence which will greatly aid your conclusion at the end and also determine which ending you’ll get. While the game will sometimes warn you that you may not have found everything, or prompt you to maybe sit back and review what you have before moving on, it’s essentially up to you to lead your own investigation and be careful not to miss anything before it’s too late to go back.
To begin with, I was impressed with the amount of things you can type into the text box which the game will react to or explain why you can’t do something – such as attempting to eat a broth that you were supposed to be taking to someone who’s sick. But towards the latter parts of The Crimson Diamond, this style of gameplay did start to become frustrating to the point where I wished we had simple point-and-click mechanics instead. This is mostly because a text parser requires very specific language in order to understand what you’re asking for. Most words the game will blatantly tell you that you can’t use, such as the word ‘use’, or it’s looking for a specific word to describe something and you need to keep wheeling through a bunch of guesses until you come across the right one.
This is accentuated by The Crimson Diamond’s pixel art – which I love, but also when the game is requiring this amount of precision, the developer needs to be aware that this art style is very limiting in terms of what the player can see on the screen. I entered the woods where a scuffle of some sort had taken place. I could blatantly see there was something hanging off a branch – it looked like cloth – but when I typed ‘look’ into the text box to bring up a description of the area, the thing on the branch wasn’t mentioned. Typing in ‘examine branch’ didn’t work. And because I didn’t know what it was exactly, I couldn’t command Nancy to pick it up. It turns out it was hair, which I only worked out by, again, cycling through a bunch of words until one worked. This also became a problem during a certain investigation where I needed to identify everyone’s shoe size to match them to footprints at a potential crime scene. One way to deal with some of the more uncooperative characters was to go to places outside where you knew they had been recently and look for footprints. The only problem is that with the pixel graphics, the footprints are essentially black flecks on the ground which are incredibly hard to spot. I think when the visuals make the investigation harder like this, it’s really important that the scene descriptions make up for it to avoid any frustrating situations such as this.
But The Crimson Diamond is also genuinely challenging in an engaging and thought-provoking way too. On multiple occasions you’re required to think outside the box in order to solve cases. Though I do wish there was a better hint system involved; although typing ‘review’ into the text box will give you a summary of your findings so far and Nancy will give you a pointer on what you’re missing, there’s no specific nudges if you’re stuck on a smaller part of the overall investigation. On top of this, I found that Nancy’s review would often be confusing. At one point she kept saying she was ready to present her conclusion to a certain character, but every time I tried to do so I was still missing something. This needed to be reworded or maybe what I was missing needed to be more clearly specified because I wasted a lot of time thinking the game was bugged when really I was missing a minor piece of evidence from the scene (one that I had assumed wasn’t there because, again, I wasn’t using a specific phrase when examining the scene that the game was looking for).
Overall, I did enjoy the story, despite the darker topics it was mostly lighthearted and I enjoyed some of the encounters between Nancy and the other characters. The investigation was also quite in-depth in terms of how much freedom and leads you’re able to explore, especially considering there are often multiple ways to gather evidence. Interestingly enough, you pretty much know some of the answers to the case very early on (thanks to Nancy immediately listening in on everyone’s conversations the moment she arrives), but it’s just a case of finding the evidence to prove this. There were still certain revolutions to be found but I did think this was a unique way to go about a mystery story as it focuses not on the mystery itself but how you go about proving it.
Despite the problems the visuals brought due to the lack of detail, I do think they give The Crimson Diamond a very unique look which is true to the appearance of EGA games from the 1980s with its eccentrically bright colours and dotty shading. Paired with this is a chirpy soundtrack by Dan Policar which matches the style of game perfectly, though it does cut off abruptly in parts.
The Crimson Diamond offers plenty of challenges, albeit some of these came from the visual limits and problems with the text parser but the visuals limits especially would be an easy fix with some more detailed descriptions to make up for it. But overall it brought an intriguing storyline and collection of puzzles that really make the player think outside the box. On top of this, with how thorough you need to be in order to cover everything, there is replayability in there for perfectionists.
Jess played The Crimson Diamond on PC with a review code.
