Nancy Maple had only spent a few minutes at the Crimson Lodge before I had her killed in The crimson diamond. The amateur mineralogist — on an errand for the Royal Canadian Museum, where she works as a clerk — spent hours on a train deep into the Canadian wilderness, searching for diamonds. I figured she might want a shower. So I click Nancy around the Crimson Lodge, peeking into rooms and occasionally saying hello to other guests. I find a bathroom with a tub and shower, maneuver Nancy next to it, and type Take a shower. It doesn’t work because Nancy is fully clothed. I type Undressingand Nancy doesn’t because the door is open. Makes sense! I point Nancy to the door. Close the door. Now Undressing. Back in the shower I pick up Turn on the water tap on my keyboard. Switch to showerNow Nancy can go inside.
But then, The crimson diamond cuts to another angle, Nancy’s silhouette behind a shower curtain. The music changes. Anyone who’s seen a horror movie knows what’s coming — the door handle wobbles. The door opens. Nancy is stabbed to death. I forgot to lock the door.
The crimson diamondby developer and illustrator Julia Minamatais a game about precision. Not precision in terms of movement, but precision with words. Minamata’s first solo-developed game uses a text parser to control the action. (Except for Nancy herself; she moves with a mouse click or arrow keys.) It’s a feature that was used a lot in games of the ’80s and early ’90s; Sierra On-Line is known for its text parser games like The King’s Quest And The Colonel’s Legacy: A Mystery by Laura Bow. Instead of pointing and clicking in these games, you type commands. If you want Nancy to eat a rock, you type Eat stone(But maybe she doesn’t.)
“You don’t see a lot of text parser games these days,” Minamata told Polygon. “I won’t say I’m surprised, but at the same time, we’re a society where we’re texting and typing all the time. It’s a constant thing. We’re interacting with each other and the written word all the time. I just love that way of interacting with a game. It feels like there’s unlimited possibilities.”
This is where being precise with language comes in. Even the slightest tweak to a word changes what happens. You can look around a room, but what if you investigate something? And, again, as I learned, what if you close the door but don’t lock it? Nancy’s near-instantaneous murder — forcing me to start over from my last save — was the perfect lesson I needed to understand The crimson diamond and what it asked of me.
The game opens with Nancy Maple boarding a train to a remote Ontario lodge, where she’s tasked with investigating a mysterious diamond cut from the belly of a fish. Diamonds aren’t common in the area, or so they say, so a few others arrive: relatives of the lodge owners looking to claim an inheritance, a curious Japanese-Canadian birdwatcher (an homage to Minamata’s family history in Canada, she said), and a government geologist. Everyone expects it to be a quick trip, but an explosion on a bridge suddenly leaves them all trapped in the lodge with the grumpy owner, the house staff, and the owner’s wife. Chaos ensues—both surrounding the family drama, the history of a failed mining town, a death (not Nancy’s!), and of course, the diamond.
The crimson diamond is divided into seven distinct chapters, most of which take place within the Crimson Lodge and its surrounding grounds. Over the course of several hours, you become very familiar with the characters and their stories, both as individuals and in terms of how their backstories play into the larger mystery. Nancy becomes the de facto detective who pieces it all together. One of the early mysteries involves a robbery: someone has stolen an expensive brooch and a pair of steins. It’s Nancy’s first foray into detective work; to do it, you’ll need to find makeshift tools to dust and examine fingerprints before you track down the culprit. You’ll need to obtain fingerprints from everyone in the house, some of which are as simple as asking, but others require more thought and forethought, such as feeding a man a cookie so salty he needs a drink—an act that requires him to touch a glass from which you can later extract a fingerprint.
The game quickly becomes more complex and layered, but Minamata said she didn’t want that The crimson diamond to be punishable, as early text parsers could be. (If you get stuck, Minamata has put a full hint guide online; there’s no way to get so stuck that you have to stop playing.) The parser itself, for example, is a bit more forgiving with words. You can’t accidentally let the game progress to the point where you miss important clues. It doesn’t have the easy, sudden death of The Colonel’s Legacyor. “That’s something you have to work for,” Minamata said. “My kind of puzzle is the idea of something so simple that you would think to do in real life, but for some reason it just passes you by when you’re playing a game. But when you do it, you’re rewarded with, Hey, you survived the shower this time.“
These adjustments do not make it The crimson diamond Easy, anyway, but they reduce frustration, allowing you to truly engage with the world and enjoy it — rather than dread it.
The crimson diamond was released on August 15 on Mac and Windows PC. The game was reviewed on Windows PC using a pre-release download code provided by Julia Minamata. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.