There are many classic adventure titles I’ve not played. Some I probably never will. Some do intrigue me still. For example – I heard very interesting things about The Colonel’s Bequest, an investigation focused title where you could completely fail solving anything and still finish the game. Hopefully I will eventually play it, but the reason I’m bringing it up is because The Crimson Diamond seems to have been influenced not just by any Sierra adventure titles, but this one in particular. And it’s not just the EGA-styled visuals that call back to the long past era of adventure titles. Far more interesting is the fact that this is a text parser based adventure. You don’t see these often anymore.
As you might’ve guessed by now, The Crimson Diamond is a modern adventure game, designed around concepts and mechanics that hasn’t been in use for quite some time. Just like most classic Sierra titles, this game is controlled with arrows and typing short phrases into a command line. You do get a visual inventory screen and mouse can be used to examine inventory objects or move the character on screen, but for the most part you better get used to quickly typing combinations of “verb + something” if you want something done. And seemingly to avoid ambiguity and motivate informed actions, the game does not accept “use” as a verb, requiring you to think about how exactly the object must be handled. As was always the case, this approach feels a lot more investigative and gives the player more chances to feel smart. But also has a downside of making many actions slower and more repetitive.
But it all works when the story is interesting and the mystery is gripping… Which is not something that happens in The Crimson Diamond. Don’t get me wrong – there are curious mysteries and the more you play, the more drama happens. It’s just that… I suppose, what I expected was a 2024 game using 1989 technology and what this game is feels more like a game you’d get in the middle of the 90s. What I mean by that is – stories and character motivations has gotten quite a lot more complex and engaging over the years. Characters in “serious” adventure games feel more like real people rather than weird adventurers who put junk into their pockets and ransack random people’s rooms for no reason. Heck, you can die in this game very early on for seemingly no reason and it doesn’t feel like cool foreshadowing, it feels silly and out of place.
Though the biggest “old game” feeling comes from just how underutilized the text parser truly is. The potential of a text parser is in the idea that you can talk to characters about basically everything and expect to get a reaction. You could experiment with item usage and get results. But this game immediately kills that promise by showing just how limited and context specific most of these interactions are. Writing “ask X about Y” very often gets no meaningful result even when it clearly should. Why is the bird watching lady who is watching birds right this very moment “doesn’t know anything” on the topic of birds? Things like this, along with the repetition of tasks you often must perform to be a good investigator (whom you are not, by the way, the character just decides to act like one), really made me wish the game would drop the pretense and work like a LucasArts game with a mouse control and a contextual “use” command. Because in reality that’s how most of the things in the game are, just made less conveniently. Maybe I just expect more from a modern investigative game, with examples like Lamplight City, but investigating in this game felt like I was constantly going against what game wants me to do and it rarely felt right or exciting.
Which is not to say that The Crimson Diamond is bad. It very much isn’t. There are cool moments, yes including those that do work better (or exclusively) with text parser. And I did like playing it overall. It simply feels like a disappointment when taking the setup into consideration. Text parser, limited location, few characters – setup for a truly fantastic tightly made investigation game where characters feel alive and selection of verbs comes naturally. Instead, it’s just a good Sierra-like adventure game that feels like something from the 1990s, with a few modern quality of life features. And that’s alright too.