This picture is slowly taking shape in my head, the text comes last.
Julia Minamata
A text parser? I type “open drawer”, then “look in drawer”, then “take brochures” in 2024 on a computer that can create a 4K 3D model of the Acropolis at my command? Is that really what The purple diamond asks us?
Yes, it is, and sole developer/writer/producer Julia Minamata is right to ask that question. If you have text-prompt adventures from the likes of Sierra in your mental library (such as The Colonel’s Legacy)or if you are willing to accommodate the parser, it will work. The purple diamond‘s parser is pretty flexible, accepting a range of nouns and verbs in most cases. You can still use arrow keys and a mouse to move around and click some useful keyboard shortcuts. And the parser has keyboard shortcuts, like typing “n” to look in your quest tracking notebook, or “od” or “oc” for the very common actions like opening a door or cabinet.
There are a lot of cabinets and drawers in this game because it’s set in 1914 in Northern Ontario, Canada. You are Nancy Maple, a young geologist yearning for field work, sent by your museum to the mining town of Crimson to investigate a diamond that fell from the guts of a river fish. Everything goes wrong on your journey, and you’re left on your own to investigate this town, its strange residents and visitors, and eventually a crime that may or may not have something to do with potential diamonds.
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The tutorial room does a great job of getting you familiar with the controls: arrow keys or mouse pointer for moving and selecting, but tapping for the actual action.
Julia Minamata
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You spend quite a bit of time in the cabin, chatting, looking around, and buying little things you know you’ll need later.
Julia Minamata
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Cutscenes provide the artist with new angles from which to demonstrate his remarkable EGA skills.
Julia Minamata
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The characters in this game are more complex than you might remember from times of limited memory, and usually have more than one note.
Julia Minamata
A few things need to be disclosed. First, Minamata designed the EGA-style social avatar for Benj Edwards, Ars’ senior AI reporter, who alerted me to the existence of this game. Second, this is a game that costs $15 on Steam or Itch.io (and is 10% off on Steam for the first week of release), made by a Canadian solo developer, with music by the remarkably cool keyboardist Dan Policar, and it brings back some of my earliest, pre-Maniac Villa Memories of adventure games. I didn’t finish the game either. I’m not going to examine it with the magnifying glass of critical gems; I just think more people should know about it.
Release trailer for The purple diamond
Apart from nostalgia and outsider feeling, The purple diamond looks and sounds great. The creative limitations of an EGA-like color palette and pixel block size have produced some scenes that are simply wonderful to look at. The soundtrack loops pleasantly and occasionally catchily. Rock Paper Shotgun’s Alice Bell played for much longer (around six hours and almost or nearly finished), and her biggest complaint is almost a throwback: a few puzzles with obscure solutions that are far too easy to miss with text parsing and EGA graphics.
I’m excited to see where Nancy Maple’s journey takes her, even if I sometimes have to rack my brain to find the right text that states the obvious. The game so far has felt like spending time in one of those non-violent crime dramas you see on PBS (or CBC), only in a familiar and evocative game format.
Listing image by Julia Minamata
