Game: The Crimson Diamond
Genre: Adventure, Puzzle, Text Adventure
System: Steam (Windows)
Developers | Publishers: Julia Minamata
Controller Support: None
Price: US $14.99 | UK £11.39 | EU € 12,49
Release Date: August 15th, 2024
A review code was used, and many thanks to Player Two PR.
The Crimson Diamond is a text-based adventure similar to those popular in the 1980s. It features a young woman who is in search of diamonds in a dead mining town.
The Story and Gameplay of The Crimson Diamond
The Crimson Diamond is a text adventure. In order to do anything in the game, you need to type it in manually. It also has the same graphics you might remember from old Sierra games and those of that generation; it even features CGA-style colors with severely limited pallets and oddly bright colors. It feels like I have been transported back to the late 1980s to early 1990s when I played a ton of similar titles.
It’s pretty story-rich, as most graphic adventures in a similar vein are; you have to speak with everyone, interact with everything, and constantly look around. Since the graphics aren’t great, you need to make sure to read every description of every single location carefully.
You play as a young woman named Nancy. She is a new geologist, and she wants to be able to prove herself to her boss. She takes a strange job where a fisherman has found a huge diamond inside of a fish. The agency sends her to discover whether or not the diamond is local, but you end up embroiled in a mystery that has the only house left in Crimson town in an uproar.
How Esoteric are the Puzzles?
If you have played a lot of text adventures, I know that this is the first question you asked yourself when opening up this review to read it. As I booted up The Crimson Diamond for the first time, I actually had a kind of weird flashback moment to getting stuck on the Rumpelstiltskin puzzle in King’s Quest 1. I was worried that I would be in for more of the same with The Crimson Diamond.
Thankfully, developer Julia Minamata seemed to keep these types of puzzles to a minimum. There were a couple of times I got absolutely stuck in places I would never have found my way out of (like the icebox puzzle), but there was a hearty hint system in the form of a handy-dandy website you can access from the game’s menu.
While some of the puzzles are a little unintuitive (I’m still looking at you, icebox puzzle), most seem fairly straightforward. I liked a lot of the puzzles, and many were like real-world solutions. Overall, I think the puzzles were really well done.
The Cons of The Crimson Diamond
While I had a lot of fun with my time in the world of The Crimson Diamond, I did have a couple of issues that I didn’t like about it. The music, or the lack of music, to be precise, was a huge downside for me. There were some places in the game where you ended up in a place that had no music.
You would get occasional sound effects, but mostly just silence and opening door sounds over and over again. I was pretty disappointed that there were so many times I just had to go without; I didn’t want to mute it or turn something else on because I wasn’t sure if The Crimson Diamond had any sound puzzles.
The second issue I had with The Crimson Diamond was the color palette. While it’s fun to wax poetic about old games and how strange the colors made the developers have to be more creative with the looks, there was no reason to recreate it here, and a million reasons why CGA and similar should be left in the past. Some of the scenes in The Crimson Diamond were eye-watering. My modern eyes can no longer deal with the ancient color schemes and too-bright aesthetics. I think there were several places where swapping out modern colors with the older neon ones would have made the game much, much more pleasing to the eye.
Conclusion
Overall, I liked my time with The Crimson Diamond. I think it feels like a complete game with no bugs that I ran across. The story is interesting, and the puzzles are fun. However, some of the music and visual choices were not to my taste. If you like old-school text adventures, The Crimson Diamond may be just the thing for you. However, if you don’t like all the eccentricities of text adventures, I would avoid this one.
Final Verdict: I Like it a Lot.
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