The Crimson Diamond is beautifully rendered in old EGA adventure game style, but suffers from all the same problems as its parser predecessors. Among them are - frustrating verb usage, cluttered inventories, unclear ways to advance, and overly complex clue/item collecting.

Many, many times I found myself knowing exactly what I needed to do, but then agonizingly puzzling my way through how to enter it in the parser so that Nancy would actually do it. And while I understand the desire to eliminate the word "use" from the parser - it often came across as high falutin rather than accessible or player friendly. The game wants you to be more precise - but my attempts at precision led to frustration and repeated frustration led me to care less about being thorough. This in turn meant I just pushed through where I could. It's too bad because the story is somewhat interesting and the dialog is not overly bloated.

Despite missing key things (and knowing I did - because I just wanted to finish the story), I'd say the ending was satisfying, but I am not inclined to replay it to get other endings, lest I develop more resentment toward the ever-condescending parser.

Lovely to look at, frustrating to play - skip this unless you want something that offers a very similar experience to the parser games of yore. I would absolutely not characterize this game as an accessible on-ramp to adventure games. It gets the job done for a EGA parser style game, and it's lovely looking.

MOST IMPORTANTLY - uncritical nostalgia is a toxic impulse that this game insists you indulge in fully - and due to that I cannot recommend it.

Like others, if I could have given a sideways thumb, I would. I really wanted to like this game, and I imagine it could be improved to be an easy thumbs up.

The good: As an elder millennial, I adore the game art - it's gorgeous and nostalgic. I want more games like this - I find nothing more relaxing than slowly exploring a world and figuring out puzzles. The spine of this game has the potential to provide that.

But - lots of downsides result in a game that is, well, not that fun. Interesting as a step down memory lane, but kinda a slog. There is a reason most players haven't made it to the end (and it's a short game!)

Like others have noted, sometimes it's frustrating to figure out the right verbs to "use" in the text parser. It goes beyond not being able to use "use" - there were a number of times where I knew what I had to do, but had to turn to a walkthrough to find the right verb. Likewise, there are often multiple steps required and it's easy to miss one. You can't just dust and collect a fingerprint, you need to first dust, then examine, then collect, then examine again. Even knowing this, I sometimes found I had somehow skipped a step somehow, so there was a lot of returning to various spots to go through the whole series of steps again.

The UI on the notebook is not great - it's hard to keep track of the various threads, such that when I got to the final interrogation scene, even though I knew I technically had uncovered some of the answers I found myself unmotivated to figure them out.

There are a couple of puzzles that are quite hard - an optional hint or two baked into the game would be nice.

The game is also fairly short. While I haven't technically completed it (from getting annoyed at the final interrogation scene), I've played 7 hrs and it's basically done. I don't feel that motivated to replay it, even though I know I missed some clues/puzzles.

If it's on a steep sale, I'd still recommend for those nostalgic for games like this. I hope the designer continues to make games like this and/or improve on this game.

Gave it a good crack. I realize i'd rather just sit and watch a tv series like this as opposed to playing a text-base adventure game. Nail in the coffin for me was the classic nonsensical ways in which to obtain some key items/clues which just didnt jive with me too well. The text parser is really cool though, probably the best one ever made

The EVGA style graphics and the text parser were novel, but it wasn't a very fun game. Many actions in the game are frustratingly multi-part, and the ending makes you feel punished for not taking every step. For example, if you search a container and find something you haven't collected what you found. You'll need to do that separately. In the conclusion of the game there are several items that I'd discovered but never picked up and didn't have. It wasn't a great experience, and the resulting unsatisfying ending did not make me want to replay it to get a better one.

It°s difficult to find the right words. AI could be put to good use here, or at least a dictionary.

The Crimson Diamond, the game you want to give a thumbs up but just can't.

So, this was a project made by one person and is clearly a love letter to the Laura Bow series, except unlike the Laura Bow series, which has obnoxious timers, countless deaths, and text parser blues, TCD is a game with more of a classic adventure game formula which makes a few things better but has a weaker story which is still hampered by archaic game systems.

Let's start with the good:
1. It's the perfect length and difficulty. It gets rid of Sierra-style nonstop deaths and nonsensical logic problems. Only once or twice did I feel like I needed to look up a solution or what to do next, and often, that was due to fighting with the parser.

2. The graphics, sounds, and general aesthetics are a perfect time travel machine for Colonel's Bequest, which brings back good memories of childhood. It's charming and does feel like an old DOS game.

3. Bug-free for the most part. I tried breaking the game a few times and found a few minor errors, but nothing game-breaking.

Now the bad...

1. The story - Laura Bow, I mean Nancy Maple, who is pretty much a clone of Laura Bow, is a geologist in Canada! So, the most boring profession in the most boring area in the entire world. In her tedious quest to study rocks, she meets equally boring characters when a murder occurs. The murderer, who you will determine who is in the first two minutes of the game, does a terrible job of hooking you for the whole mystery portion. The characters fit the Canadian love of blandness by making them easy to read with motivations and methods, so the mystery, if you can call it that, is solved within two seconds, eventually sadly ending with a lack of luster. "Let's review your knowledge and actions and give you a detective score!" similar abysmal finale to that which occurred at the end of Laura Bow 2.

2. The Parser - The game tries to hook you with the parser. It really wants you think this is good - It's not. In fact, it's pointless. The conversations, branch dialog, and actions are so limited in number that they can all be done with a basic choice of action. Thrill as you have to type "scratchplate with a sample" instead of just clicking and hovering one item over another. People say, "But it has that Nostalgic vibes!" and to that, I say, even Sierra would say that system is annoying and obnoxious, especially in the year of the lord in 2024.

3. The Fun—Nancy Maple is a slow game but also a boring game. There is no fun to be had with the parser, and there are no countless violent deaths for Nancy Maple. The only time I got a chuckle was a clear Easter egg to The Colonel's Bequest regarding a death while taking a shower, which doesn't work with the story at all, but it is still interesting. It just seems so bland. The world is so dull. The characters are uninteresting. The big morality choice at the end for your ending type is so eye-rolling long, simplistic, and dull.

So, would I recommend the Crimson Diamond? No. Don't get me wrong; the creator did an amazing job on a one-man project, but the game itself is a love letter to a gaming relic that didn't need anything dedicated to it. Adventure games, in general, should stay dead and remain buried in the ground. Let the dead rest in peace. I hope Juila Minamata makes her future games but does something original and unique to her interests instead of copying the same flawed game I played 30 years ago yet somehow making it worse in the story and in some mechanics.

Blame Steam for the thumbs down, I'd give it a sideways thumb if I could. My feelings are mixed as are my feelings today on the Sierra graphical text adventures I loved as a kid. I liked and still like the introduction of Colonel's Bequest, which I first saw on a demmo machine at Computer Village, Palmerston North at Xmas 1990. When I finally got to play it I was disappointed in many ways, but even if not very fun to play, the game had a strong atmosphere through to the end hence when the game appeared at GOG in early 2017 I was keen to buy it and play through it again. And looking back, I'm glad Roberta took a break from King's Quest to make something a bit more mature. Then I discovered Julia's demmo, at first glance thinking it was some sort of remake of or sequel to Colonel's Bequest. I played the demmo and at the end of it had mixed feelings even at that stage. Of all the guests/residents, three stood out as "bad" while the others were, at most, rough around the edges. So I was concerned that the game was making it way too clear who was going to do the dirty deed(s). I couldn't be sure though and I messaged Julia to tell her I was interested in seeing how the game progresses after the collapse of the bridge ending Chp. 1. It was nice to follow Julia's gradual game-building via blogs and vlogs and she often responded to little comments I made (I also talked to her about my own text adventure hobby projects in AGI Studio and SCI Companion). When Julia FINALLY linked us the finished game on Steam last Friday (New Zealand time) I was keen to give it my best shot and played it good over the next few days until I'd got all the achievements plus looking through Julia's online hint book to see what I'd missed.

You could say I like a lot of little things about the game, but there's some big things I don't like. So I think the Crimson Lodge residents are good for having a lot of depth, there's so much you can ask them about and get a good response to, fleshing them out, also the close-up, face views are very detailed and expressive, giving everyone more charracter. I started to feel close to them especially Jack, Nathan and Kimi. Colonel's Bequest is obviously the main blueprint for Crimson Diamond, but its wealth of history and science got me thinking of another late '80s Sierra adventure, Gold Rush! by Ken and Doug McNeill one of the last text adventures made for the earlier AGI interpreter, Gold Rush! turned out to be one of the most fun ways to learn about American history and geography, Crimson Diamond doesn't have the travelling of Gold Rush!, but you learn North American history and geography in a fun way, including the Klondike Gold Rush, NW Canada, 1896-1899. Learning about and practicing mineralogy was fun too, I'm sure I've played other games where you have to learn a little scientific fieldwork to solve problems and puzzles. I think some people have talked about the puzzles being a little too easy to solve, it's true that back in the day, Sierra adventures would take me months or even an entire year to solve and I finished Crimson Diamond and gained most of the achievements without the hint book or the forum in just a few days, but for me a game can still be great even if the average gamer finishes it in about a week, some games have enough going for them that you enjoy playing them through again and again like watching a good movie. Crimson Diamond is certainly replayable what with multiple endings, achievements, missed evidence and cut scenes etc. The fingerprint dusting, footprint studying and other detective work of course recalls another Sierra adventure, Police Quest 2.

So my big dislike was the whodunnit, murder mystery part of the game. I said that when I played the demmo, it seemed to strongly finger a select few guests as baddies, the ones who would commit the murder(s) and I was very disappointed to find that the murder mystery played out just about exactly as the demo suggested it would. Nessa and her lawyer Corvus are typically rich, arrogant, English and greedy, there to get richer at the expense of the local folk, but least subtle of all, as early as Chp. 1, you see that she's bought a bowl of almonds to the lodge and learn that Evan is deathly allergic to them. To be fair there were moments where I had hope that the solution to the murder would involve others, I thought that perhaps Nessa and Corvus had blackmailed Jack into being an accomplice, that he had poisoned Margot with garlic or arsenic, but the whole thing seemed to turn into a Disney scenario where Nessa was the wicked witch and Corvus her Igor. Or maybe Nessa was like Lolotte from King's Quest IV, but I don't much like the King's Quests apart from the charm of the simple AGI/SCI artwork and that the first King's Quest introduced a new, more interactive type of text adventure back in '84. Albert Respa/Karl Lefler was a bit of a caricature too, fat, bald, monocled, cigar-smoking, curly moustached, aloof and German, very easy to right away see as a villain. I actually wondered if there really was a German, WW1 saboteur in Canada called Karl Lefler, I did some research and there was a Canadian-German Karl Respa jailed for attempted sabotage in WW1 so I guess it's clear where the Crimson Diamond charracter's name and alias came from. Lastly, Miss Nancy Maple (a reference to Miss Marple?), I think she basically IS Laura Bow from Colonel's Bequest and too much of a boring, girl scout type, I think it's Albert who at one point refers to her as Nosy Nancy and I kinda sympathize with him ;)

So yeah, I liked a lot of little things, disliked a couple of big things, I don't want to give it a thumbs down, but Steam is like Siskel and Ebert movie reviews, you either like it or you don't, besides there are so many positive reviews that it a red thumb might make the review page a little more interesting. On a five star rating I guess I'd give it two or two and a half.

Required use of the text parser made playing this a chore.