The Crimson Diamond sees players figuring out who’s up to what as several people get involved with the appearance of a massive gem.
Nancy Maple is a clerk at the Royal Canadian Museum who dreams of studying geology. This makes her a good candidate to figure out why a huge diamond was found inside of a fish in the small town of Crimson, Ontario. Several people have popped up with varied interests in the diamond and its source (some of which are on the lethal side), so you’ll need to figure out the interwoven plots and schemes to figure out what’s truly going on.
Playing detective in this situation will truly challenge your mind, too, thanks to the game making use of a text parsing system. Instead of clicking on objects to use them or put them together, you’ll need to use the right words to tell the game what you want to do. If you want to eavesdrop on some people talking in another room, you’ll need to tell the game that explicitly. This can feel a bit complicated at first, but it quickly feels like it involves you in the mystery directly. You have to really think about what would be a good thing to do in a given situation and then tell the game to do just that. No clicking around to blunder across an answer. You need to really figure out what’s the best plan. Hint: it doesn’t involve falling in the river.
The Crimson Diamond sprawls out in several different directions as you play it, as following one course of action might make you miss out on some other clue or hint. The game really does expect you to be clever while solving a mystery as it unfolds, and by requiring the player make use of the right words, you feel deeply connected in solving this puzzle. In doing so, it gave me one of those rare moments of feeling like I was genuinely being clever while figuring the story out.
The Crimson Diamond is available now on itch.io, FireFlower Games, and Steam.
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