The Crimson Diamond

The Crimson Diamond's a good 'Nancy Drew'-esque Sierra type game, with a strict adherence to old school parser gameplay. This makes it nice and retro, and the spriteing is lovely, emulating that time well. The parsing is alright, manageable and simple. There's shortcuts, but the game is doomed to be clunky by its own design. It's inevitable. The game also tells a cool story, not the most deep, but emulative of old children's mystery novels, which are personally quite nostalgic for me. The sound design and retro aesthetic is lovingly crafted, and the dev's a trooper. But. I've never seen a more dislikable cast of core characters. I purposefully chose the worst ending, they're all so annoying. It's theoretically bad, but the characters were so comically villainous and unlikable that I just skipped it. I'm sure I missed much of their depth, and I'll keep the review positive, but good god are they unrelenting. Also, the player must frequently remember to pick up evidence, which just add...

I had so much fun playing this. A year later, I still think about it all the time and remember it fondly. The visuals were a highlight for me, as was the music, but what impressed me most were the setting, design, characters, and vibrant dialog. Evergreens just seems to pop, not just the visuals, and the design is something that would have blown people away back when. It’s advanced beyond what you’d expect. I’m mostly a console player these days, but this game got me to sit at my old pc. I’m excited for Julia’s next game.

Very fun nod to the classic Sierra-style adventure games (though thankfully mostly absent of the moon logic!) I greatly enjoyed my time with this game overall, though did find myself opening the guide a time or two out of frustration when I just could NOT figure out what the input wanted from me to proceed (one example I feel I can cite without getting spoiler-y : Using a cup full of water in my inventory to douse the fire in a fireplace. I tried various combinations of 'pour water on fire' 'toss water on fire' 'throw water on fire' 'use water from mug on fire' for a good, solid 5 minutes before finally opening the guide and discovering that you HAD to use the specific word 'douse' in your input.)

Good

Very good, cozy and suspenseful, a delightful little world to explore and decipher. It doesn't go easy on you either, you can fail to solve all the mysteries by the end and I only got a B- ending, lots I didn't figure out! Main character is cute, a fun archetype as well with how weirdly plucky she is in the face of disturbing and grim circumstances. High recommend!

This game is awesome. Easily far better than the game influences it draws from. Beautiful EGA (look it up!!) art throughout. Julia Minamata is a powerhouse designer. You may not be familiar with games like this, because there aren't game likes this. Please give it a chance - I would say at least until you solve your first fingerprint mystery.

My first text parser adventure game and I wholeheartedly loved it! I did have the hintbook that is linked in-game up as I played and that saved me from some frustration! Everything from the setting to the mystery itself were done well. You can feel that this game was made with love and care. I decided early in that I wanted to get all the achievements and it wasn't very hard to do so on my first playthrough as I had multiple save points. Really excited that a sequel is in development!

Already top 10 point and click for me.

This is an EXCELLENT recreation of the old Sierra games. If you liked Colonel's Bequest, Space Quest, King's Quest, or any of those old Sierra games, you will love this. I was particularly impressed with the breadth of the animations. They were not only spot-on true to the Sierra style, but they were amazing in their completeness, with animations for pulling things off of high shelves, climbing into bed, taking off shoes, and all manner of other small spot animations that could have easily been skipped with just a text blurb, but they were animated out. The story was engaging and offered quite a bit of gameplay. The game comes with a hint listing so you won't get stuck – and I needed it a few times – but I still felt that I was largely able to explore the game productively on my own. And there's a lot to explore. The environment is large and detailed, with lots of little nooks and crannies that play into the plot – drawers with keys that need to be found, drawers that...