The Crimson Diamond: An Interpretive Eighties Adventure

After the eighties-inspired cRPG SKALD, I immediately folded into another eighties-inspired game with a different genre: The Crimson Diamond, a classic Sierra-Online inspired adventure (almost) single handedly put together by Julia Minamata.

In this charming EGA-style graphic adventure, you’re slipping into the shoes of miss Nancy Maple, a Canadian graduate mineralogist that is sent to a remote place called Crimson to investigate the possible presence of diamonds. Of course, that’s just the boring cover: the first hour you’re trying to identify rock specimens, the next you’re investigating a murder and mysterious disappearance. The thought of diamonds, however, never truly leaves your mind. Ka-tsjing.

Even though I never played the original Sierra-Online adventure games, The Crimson Diamond wears its influence on its sleeve: contrary to post-SCUMM Lucasfilm adventure games, everything you intend to do has to map to a command the game recognizes. In other words, if you want to talk to someone, you type talk to x, and if you want to eat a cookie, you type eat x. Handy shortcuts for recurring terms do exist (e.g. o d means open door and t jj means talk to Jack) to ease the repetitive nature of retyping commands.

Having such a mechanic in place as a basis of operations for the entire game, however charming and eighties-like, does come with serious repercussions: if the game doesn’t understand what you’re trying to achieve, you’re out of luck. In Monkey Island, your options were limited by the usage of the SCUMM verbs: use, talk to, pull, et cetera. In here, typing use rope on tree will result in the lovely message this game does not know the word ‘use’, meaning I had to come up with alternatives.

This presents a few very difficult to overcome problems:

1. For a non-native English speaker like me, coming up with the exact terms I think the game wants me to type is frustrating;
2. I’m frequently confused about the correct usage of prepositions, conjugations, and so forth, as sometimes the former seems to work and sometimes only the latter;
3. When a logical chain of actions has to be carried out that SCUMM-like adventure games Just Do, I constantly forget a few of them and wonder why nothing happens.

Without spoiling it: in one particular puzzle, I wanted to give something “enhanced” to someone. Let’s say a spiced drink. I type give spiced drink to Ann. Ann says no thank you. Huh? But if I type give drink to Ann, that works, while before, it didn’t as I had both a normal and a spiced one in my pockets, and I had to explicitly put spice in drink to achieve its desired effect.

In another, I simply wanted to use something from my inventory. You know, press i (inventory pops up), click on something, and click on something on screen. No can do: how do I convert that into a command without relying on the non-existing use? Sure, that can be a nice puzzle in itself to keep yourself busy, but for me, this made it painfully obvious how archaic and outdated this kind of adventure interface can be—especially if you’re not sure about the correct English term. In the bathroom, I tried for fifteen minutes to get that damn shower running and eventually just gave up. It turned out to be an optional thing.

Another major gripe: if you don’t pay attention to what Nancy is saying (“I better not get too close to that river stream!”), you’ll simply die. Wait, what? The game is friendly enough not to autosave your progress. Great. There are only a few occasions in which this can happen, but still, twice the game tricked me into it and twice I had to replay ten minutes of scenes. Not the end of the world, but still more annoying than the “haha, got you there!” death scene.

It seems that my playthrough has left me frustrated, and in one way, it did, but in another, I still very much enjoyed myself with the characters, the story, and the lovely pixel art. There’s a lot of semi-hidden stuff you can miss, and in the end of the game, after an investigative round or two, you’ll be scored on how well you did untangling and solving the mysteries the game presents. The Crimson Diamond wants you to replay it to discover even more—but its mechanics put me off too much to try and reattempt it.

In the end, I feel the same way about The Crimson Diamond as I do about The Darkside Detective: for me, they’re good but not great adventure game fillers where the main premise isn’t enough to keep me going, or the main mechanic bothers me more than it allures me to keep on going. I can imagine other gamers, such as native-English speakers who perhaps have played these text-input adventure games before, to completely fall in love with The Crimson Diamond. I am not one of those gamers.

I did, however, love the eighties-inspired EGA art, the animations and translucency of buildings you enter, and the mystery that shrouds the remote Canadian village Crimson. If you don’t mind wrestling with free-form input and figuring out what to type instead of what to do in the game, you’ll probably have a great (and quite lengthy) time. Adventure Gamers rated it Excellent.

Oh, and there’s almost no music present, which is forgivable given the gigantic amount of work Julia Minamata must have put into this to get it out there, but even a few more creepy 8-bit background tunes peppered in might have helped to create the right atmosphere.

It’s not Monkey Island—and unlike most other indie adventure games, it doesn’t pretend to be. But it’s still worth checking out.