"The Crimson Diamond" - Canadian Laura Bow
Posted: Thu Apr 09, 2020 8:11 am
I'm surprised that there's still no topic at all about this game...
http://www.thecrimsondiamond.com/
It's not a Laura Bow game, nor is it a game with any personal relationship to Sierra, but it's pretty much an homage to Laura Bow. It's a text parser game (not very happy about it) with EGA graphics (really happy about it ) and, as a German review said, screenshots from "The Crimson Diamond" wouldn't stand out much if intermingled with "The Colonel's Bequest"...
(Too bad I forgot to squeeze the image back into "single pixels" - from 640x400 to 320x200.)
(Jack, one of the characters, "breaks the fourth wall".)
(Note the beautiful wallpaper and the Alphonse Mucha poster on the wall - I really like Art Nouveau, particularly Mucha. And the shower scene is quite a nod to "The Colonel's Bequest", except that in "The Crimson Diamond" you can take a shower safely - you just have to lock the door from the inside... Nancy will hear someone trying to open the door, but dismiss it as probably something in the pipes... I would also add that it's just non-threatening - someone trying to open the door, noticing: "Oh well, it's occupied" - how could Nancy know at this point that this person could have killed her if the door wasn't locked?)
(Spoiler:
Nancy is behind the tapestry.
A bit more risky, easier to be noticed, than the holes in pictures in Misty Acres, which were created precisely for the purpose of eavesdropping and secretly observing other people...)
Generally, the plot is like: it's happening in Ontario, Canada, in 1909, if I remember well... Nancy Maple is working in a natural history museum and hopes to get a formal training in mineralogy (remember that it was a time when women still weren't allowed to study in a lot of places and I can't even express my anger over misogyny, over all this hatred, all this bullshit spread about women by men who don't even have a clue about us). At the same time, in a fictional town of Crimson, a fisherman finds a large diamond in the belly of a fish and it sparks hopes that diamonds could be found somewhere in the area... So Nancy is sent by her boss to Crimson to investigate the situation.
Currently, a free demo is available, which only includes the intro (mostly unfinished, that's why Jack says "what the graphics are gonna look like") and the first evening in the mansion - you also don't go outside, at most you can go to the balcony. If I remember well, I heard Julia Minamata say in one of the interviews that she's trying to aim for a release around November this year.
http://www.thecrimsondiamond.com/
It's not a Laura Bow game, nor is it a game with any personal relationship to Sierra, but it's pretty much an homage to Laura Bow. It's a text parser game (not very happy about it) with EGA graphics (really happy about it ) and, as a German review said, screenshots from "The Crimson Diamond" wouldn't stand out much if intermingled with "The Colonel's Bequest"...
(Too bad I forgot to squeeze the image back into "single pixels" - from 640x400 to 320x200.)
(Jack, one of the characters, "breaks the fourth wall".)
(Note the beautiful wallpaper and the Alphonse Mucha poster on the wall - I really like Art Nouveau, particularly Mucha. And the shower scene is quite a nod to "The Colonel's Bequest", except that in "The Crimson Diamond" you can take a shower safely - you just have to lock the door from the inside... Nancy will hear someone trying to open the door, but dismiss it as probably something in the pipes... I would also add that it's just non-threatening - someone trying to open the door, noticing: "Oh well, it's occupied" - how could Nancy know at this point that this person could have killed her if the door wasn't locked?)
(Spoiler:
Nancy is behind the tapestry.
A bit more risky, easier to be noticed, than the holes in pictures in Misty Acres, which were created precisely for the purpose of eavesdropping and secretly observing other people...)
Generally, the plot is like: it's happening in Ontario, Canada, in 1909, if I remember well... Nancy Maple is working in a natural history museum and hopes to get a formal training in mineralogy (remember that it was a time when women still weren't allowed to study in a lot of places and I can't even express my anger over misogyny, over all this hatred, all this bullshit spread about women by men who don't even have a clue about us). At the same time, in a fictional town of Crimson, a fisherman finds a large diamond in the belly of a fish and it sparks hopes that diamonds could be found somewhere in the area... So Nancy is sent by her boss to Crimson to investigate the situation.
Currently, a free demo is available, which only includes the intro (mostly unfinished, that's why Jack says "what the graphics are gonna look like") and the first evening in the mansion - you also don't go outside, at most you can go to the balcony. If I remember well, I heard Julia Minamata say in one of the interviews that she's trying to aim for a release around November this year.