When you ask me, 2024 has been a reasonably dire 12 months for giant, mainstream video games. After all there have been a couple of gems in that area, however most that I’ve performed have felt overly secure, or targeted on gameplay concepts that I don’t suppose are profitable. In opposition to this backdrop, nevertheless, some “smaller” video games have actually shined, and one of the memorable of these is The Crimson Diamond, an old-school, text-parser-based journey recreation with EGA graphics which might be concurrently attractive—drawn with a outstanding consideration to element and bursting with vivid and expressive colour and animation—and in addition appear to be one thing you may need performed in 1987.
Present in the identical lineage as traditional Sierra adventures like The Colonel’s Bequest, The Crimson Diamond casts you as Nancy Maple, a younger museum clerk in early-Twentieth-century Toronto with a fierce curiosity in geology, who seizes a chance to journey north to the small city of Crimson to analyze the invention of a large diamond. Nancy will get greater than she bargained for, nevertheless, when the company on the remoted lodge the place she’s staying begin dropping useless, and what was a geological inquiry turns right into a homicide investigation.
What I feel makes The Crimson Diamond so efficient, along with its enthralling thriller and beautiful visuals, is the way in which that it reclaims the largely discarded machine of the textual content parser, which vanished from mainstream journey recreation design following the popularization of graphical, point-and-click interfaces. It seems, as designer Julia Minamata so successfully demonstrates right here, that the textual content parser can nonetheless be an exquisite machine that facilitates deeply engaged gameplay, encouraging other ways of fascinated with and interacting together with your atmosphere than you would possibly for those who had been counting on the restricted verbs of a point-and-click recreation.
Together with the enjoyable, Agatha-Christie-style homicide thriller that powers the sport’s plot—one crammed with colourful characters, all of whom have their very own wishes, agendas, and motivations—the textual content parser right here, regardless of being an “previous” conference of journey recreation design, feels recent and invigorated, which unusually makes The Crimson Diamond really feel extra daring and forward-thinking than lots of the “fashionable,” big-budget video games I’ve performed this 12 months — Carolyn Petit
