Play on: Steam
Current target: Solve an old-fashioned mystery
A few weeks ago, I told you how I was fascinated UnconfessedA point-and-click adventure from the folks at Wadjet Eye. Well, I finished it (it was great) just in time for a new entry in the genre. And while Wadjet Eye's output is most reminiscent of the adventure games of the '90s, featuring full voice-overs and slick drag-and-drop interfaces, this new game, Red Diamond designer Julia Minamata is inspired by an earlier era of adventures played on EGA that required you to write down what you wanted your character to do. I can't wait to explore its mysteries.
Red Diamond it's perhaps most reminiscent of Sierra adventures, especially the Clara Bow plays, whose plucky heroines embarked on murder mysteries in the roaring '20s. stars Nancy Maple, a young woman investigating the discovery of an unusually large and valuable diamond in a town in northern Ontario, Canada. From the trailer, it's clear that her investigation will lead her to encounter people with their own agendas, some of them sinister, and put her in considerable danger. Sign me up!
People often talk about the evolution of adventure games from text parsers to pure graphical interfaces as a net good, as if text parsers were just a crutch, a relic from the early days of the genre that we no longer need, but I've always thought of them as two fundamentally different approaches, each with its own strengths. I think there are ways that the presence of a text parser can encourage creative thinking that a purely graphical interface doesn't always allow, as well as ways to delve deeper into the game's plot. Red DiamondI can't wait to see how this rarely seen design element is used in modern games. All in all, it looks like a perfect fit for a relaxed weekend. —Carolyn Little