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If you’ve listened to this month’s Novel Not New featuring Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, you undoubtedly heard us touch on Sierra and its legacy of brutally difficult adventure games. Before their design ethos softened in the 90s, King’s Quest, Space Quest and the like loved to screw you on technicalities, sending you tumbling down an entire set of stairs if you weren’t carefully zig-zagging across its steps. But their challenge served another purpose (when they weren’t laughing at you with a cheeky Game Over pun): if death was just an errant key press away, you would buckle down, pay attention to the world around you, and make informed decisions to survive.
The Crimson Diamond expects a similar level of attention, yet the stakes aren’t nearly as severe. It’s a solo-developed mystery adventure, rendered with the same, vibrant-yet-muddy “Enhanced Graphic Adapter” color palette you’d see in mid-to-late 80s IBM PC titles. It’s a striking look: the skin tone of everyone you meet is a little off, making them look like clay-baked homunculi rather than flesh-and-blood humans, but the high-contrast colors really bring out the little details in each intricately-designed background.
The game also expects you to use a text parser to accomplish just about anything. Before you run away screaming, I know: text parsers don’t have the rosiest reputation, and can be a real hurdle if you’re not intimately familiar with retro adventure games. But you should still give it a chance! For one, this is one of the most conveniently designed parsers I’ve ever used. There are shortcuts for nearly everything, from opening doors to addressing specific individuals in a room, and they’re all easily referenced with the press of the ‘H’ key. More importantly, it accepted most of the commands that I entered, and I rarely found myself bending my vocabulary to suit the exact phrase the game was looking for. That alone puts it above a good 60%-70% of parser-based adventure games out there.
That said, this is a mystery game inspired by the Sierra classics, and unraveling each thread won’t be a walk in the park (though you walk through a forest!) After all, you’re playing as a wannabe Canadian geologist in the 1910s named Nancy Maple, staying at a lodge in Crimson, Ontario to determine whether reports of nearby diamonds are true. She’s not the kind of girl who leaves any stone unturned: you’ll examine the consistency of minerals with a streak plate, keep tabs on every lodge guest’s movements, and find unique ways to collect fingerprints from less-than-enthusiastic suspects. And all of this happens before the murder occurs!
There are a surprising number of mysteries at play, too. Who sabotaged the train tracks you rode in on? Why do certain guests clam up or turn aggressive when you mention the possibility of diamonds in the region? How can this man call himself a fellow geologist when his reference books are practically untouched? Everyone here has their own business they’re attending to, and not all of it is necessarily sinister! But you’ll end up looking into each and every guest’s deal, just to be sure.
This level of investigation can feel exhausting during the first few hours, but once I got used to its careful, methodical pacing, I came to appreciate how much there is to find from a single piece of evidence. You’re never just collecting inventory items, asking each guest about the item’s significance, then using X on Y to move the plot forward. In fact, the plot can potentially move forward before you’re ready! Like The Colonel’s Bequest, the game that most directly inspired The Crimson Diamond, you can progress and finish without having solved a single mystery. So wring every last detail out of that vanity drawer or necklace, or you may find yourself at the credits none the wiser.
That said, I feel torn on the eavesdropping mechanic. Sometimes, walking past an occupied room will prompt Nancy to say “I can hear muffled voices from the other side of that door!” Catching these conversations in the early chapters is a breeze: if a door is open, you’ll listen nearby with your back pressed to the wall, and closed doors are easily surmountable with a convenient drinking glass pressed against the ear. But as the mystery escapes the lodge and starts encompassing the woods right outside, eavesdropping is significantly harder.
What approach angle will keep them from seeing you and clamming up? Is there anything to hide behind? Are you in the right place, at the right time, or are you missing an even more important conversation happening elsewhere? Almost every eavesdropping moment can be missed, including a conversation where one killer outright states what they did, and you won’t know what you missed until you’re reviewing the facts at the end of the game. It isn’t always obvious what makes time move forward, either: you learn pretty quickly that attending a meal in the dining room will often advance you to the next chapter, but simply examining a vital clue or walking into an unexpected area can trigger a cutscene before you’re ready to move on!
Thankfully, missing a single conversation isn’t the end of the world. There are redundancies in the evidence itself, allowing you to reach the same conclusion through multiple routes. Still, I found myself anxiously bouncing though the lodge, into the gardens and by the boathouse, desperate to hear anyone dishing out a clue that would make everything click in place. Even then, I ended up missing one or two pieces that made the mystery on the side unsolvable, even though I knew exactly what happened through context clues alone. Unless you’re playing with a step-by-step guide, you need to accept that you’ll miss out on some key moments in your first playthrough.
The Crimson Diamond expects you won’t get it all on your first try. At the end of your playthrough, Nancy offers to reflect on her time at the lodge, and will point out areas or objects that are worth further examination the next time you play the game. That said, for someone like me, who tries her damnedest to avoid GameFAQs while playing through a brand-new adventure game? It’s a tough pill to swallow.
At the very least, deaths are few and far between. You’re unlikely to see most of them if you aren’t going out of your way to futz about, like walking off the ledge of a pier or standing too close to explosives! I naively blundered into a particularly bloody scene during my first night at the lodge, but in hindsight, I should’ve recognized the trap the moment it was dangled in front of me. Fortunately, the game’s pretty good about complementing manual saves with auto saves right before pivotal moments, so all it cost me was one minute of watching an impressively detailed animation.
The Crimson Diamond is a delightful mystery adventure dressed up like a Sierra classic from the 80s, and it easily won that fan group over with flying colors. But a great deal of effort went into making this one newcomer-friendly, and from the bottom of my heart, I hope that it eventually travels beyond its niche orbit and reaches folks who wouldn’t normally try this style of game. It’s one of the more impressive solo development efforts I’ve seen in some time: it’d be a shame if only a dwindling group of niche fans take the time to enjoy it.
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