The Crimson Diamond
The Summer of Demos - Day Sixteen
It’s 1914 : The Great War begins, Babe Ruth debuts with the Red Sox and a diamond is found inside of a fish in Crimson, Ontario. Where there’s gold, there’s gold-diggers so the quiet Crimson Lodge is soon host to everyone with a stake in the land the diamond was found on. There to examine and secure the diamond for the Ontario museum is our protagonist, would-be mineralogy student Nancy Maple.
A far cry from the brash Guybrush, I felt compelled to play the part of the polite young lady Nancy is in cutscenes, knocking doors before opening them and only pocketing things she needed as she got to know the residents of the lodge. The standout mechanic so far is Nancy’s ability to eavesdrop on certain conversations, looking aghast the whole time.
The demo covers the opening chapter of the game, which took me around 45 minutes as I was getting to grips with the vocabulary of the typing system. To go through a door, you have to be close to it if there’s more than one in the room, next you type “open door” and then you walk through with the arrow keys or by clicking it. A little more convoluted a control scheme than I’m used to, but it’s part of the classic style of text adventures being evoked in the game.
Fortunately, developer Julia Minamata saw fit to include a tutorial where Nancy and the lodge’s servant Jack walk you through the basics. There’s also a notebook filled with your key objectives, mostly a list of people to talk through in the demo, so players should not get too lost no matter how long between play sessions. With a willingness to bring up Canadian colonialism at the dinner table, I’m confident that this game will be a modern experience outside of the quality of life features.
In a word : mysterious.
The Crimson Diamond is an upcoming text-parsing adventure game developed and published by Julia Minamata for PC via Itch and Steam on the 15th of August, 2024. It features music by Dan Policar. All images copyright of Julia Minamata unless otherwise stated.
This article is part of the Summer of Demos series, where I’ll be releasing a Demo Diving preview article each day in July. If you liked this article, be sure to share it with a friend or enemy. If you back me on Patreon, you get access to articles one day before they release anywhere else. If we reach £25/month before the end of July, I’ll extend the Summer of Demos into August.