Zarf Updates

I am, in some weird sense, a standard-bearer for a kind of retro adventure game, a particular kind that I played obsessively as a kid. I sometimes realize how uncomfortably particular I am. Such as when I played The Crimson Diamond, a paean to a slightly later era of retro adventure game that I didn't play and have no nostalgia for.

He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912." I said, "Die, heretic!" and I pushed him over.

[Emo Philips, of course]

I enjoyed TCD! But, look, EGA colors are ugly and giant pixel fonts hurt my eyes. The most important moment in Infocom's history was when they realized they could support the Mac's beautiful proportional fonts with only the slightest change to their virtual machine.

Okay? Now forget about me and let's talk about The Crimson Diamond.

Canada -- the 1920s. Junior museum clerk Nancy Maple is dispatched to investigate rumors of a massive diamond found in the boreal wilds of Ontario. You and your traveling companion Kimi arrive at the Crimson Lodge, where... mysteries ensue!

It's a point-and-click from the narrow era between Zork Zero and Monkey Island. You steer around a graphical world with the mouse (or arrow keys), then type commands at a parser prompt. Mutter "what's that orange blob?" and then type LOOK to find out.

See, "retro" is misleading. The UI stylings are late-1980s but the detective-game mechanics are entirely modern. This is an evidence-hunting game, not a deduction game. You hunt for clues; Nancy narrates the conclusions as you find them. And there's a really intricate tree of "what do you know and how does Nancy describe it" logic driving the whole thing. I expect that kind of plot logic from a recent Inkle game -- it did not exist in 1990.

The plot-logic engine is also used to narrate the REVIEW what-to-do-next feature. ("I've found some footprints by location, but I need to figure out everybody's shoe size before I show my conclusions to person..." That sort of thing.) The whole game is structured around this system to keep you on track and moving forward. Which I deeply appreciated. As you know, my schtick about detective games is that I suck at them. In TCD I solved the crime -- well, most of it.

As for the parser... once again I am a biased observer. I've spent a lot of time working with Inform 7, a parser system with literal decades of refinement behind it. Crimson Diamond is not trying to be that. It's better than my first BASIC two-word parser, but it's crude by modern standards.

On the up side, the author is conscious of the problem and intentionally keeps the world and object model simple. But you still sometimes run into disambiguation (several pieces of FLYPAPER, several mineral SAMPLES) and the game just isn't great at that.

Mind you, the graphical setup allows some clever tricks. If you type OPEN DRAWER in the kitchen, the parser disambiguates to the drawer you're standing next to -- impossible in the classic room-based text adventure, but intuitive here.

Most of the important verbs and nouns have abbreviations. (A locked-lodge mystery means a small cast of characters, so they can all have unique initials!) It's great that LOOK, SEARCH, and EXAMINE have one-letter abbreviations because you'll be doing them a lot.

(No, it's not common for modern IF to treat those as distinct actions. But it makes sense for a detective game. L is look at, S is look inside, X is inspect with your pocket lens. But then, you generally have to do all three so it starts to feel mechanical again.)

(You don't literally have to LOOK/SEARCH/EXAMINE every single item in the game. But you can't be sure what clue needs what verb, so you wind up doing that anyhow. Similarly, you'll SEARCH every drawer and cabinet in the house, just in case.)

The game could almost have been built with an action menu, as a pure point-and-click. That's the inevitable tension of recalling a transitional era, right? The parser was genuinely being iterated out of existence. TCD doesn't want that; it holds onto the parser ideals of creative verbs for unique situations. To spoil an early one: when you hear voices in the next room, typing LISTEN is natural and satisfyingly effective. (As well as establishing Nancy as the obsessive snoop that she is.)

Again, the parser isn't always great at this stuff. The author sets up repeated mechanics (the LISTEN thing, lifting fingerprints, mineral sample testing) so you have a repertoire of commands-known-to-work. Plus all the SEARCHing. But there are some old-fashioned adventure puzzles as well -- not the bulk of the game, but several -- and you gotta phrase everything just right.

I'm not saying it's all guess-the-verb problems. Really I only ran into a couple. But it only takes a couple to shake your faith in the game. I wound up using the walkthrough pretty heavily in the later chapters.

I also had some trouble just figuring out what the game wanted me to do. Most often, the game wants you to investigate everything throughly. I meant it about the LOOK/SEARCH/EXAMINE triptych. Find all the evidence, then move on to the next chapter. That's easy to grasp. But a couple of times, I found some evidence and then put it back so that nobody would know I'd been snooping. Later, the game chided me for not gathering evidence -- I got a suboptimal ending. Whoops! It was a reasonable course of action; I just didn't realize I'd be playing prosecuting attorney for the wrap-up.

Similarly, sometimes you can search a characters's belongings directly in front of them. Sometimes they won't let you and you have to look elsewhere. And sometimes they won't let you but it's a puzzle and you have to get them out of the way. As I said, the game tries to cue what you're doing next, but I found these situations inconsistent and frustrating. (Or walkthrough-tastic, anyway.)

...Yeah, it's one of those posts where I start by saying "I liked it!" and then focus on the flaws for half an hour. Sorry. I get analytical about this stuff.

What's great about The Crimson Diamond? The pixel artwork may not be my style but it is tight, detailed, and very readable. The pixelly animation is fantastic and there's lots of it; I can't conceive how much work went into that. The characters are well-done in a 1920s mystery-novel way -- broad strokes but not simplistic. The story has a lot going on; many secrets to discover, many red herrings. (This is not one of those Christie stories where every single character is hiding a filthy secret.)

The plot logic system, as I said, is really well done. You have many, many chains of evidence and clue discovery to follow. The goal narration (REVIEW) and the details of the ending you reach are sensitively dependent on exactly what you've discovered. I ran into a couple of logic bugs but I expect they'll be cleaned up in future releases.

As you'd expect from a 1920s mystery novel, the game wraps up with a tense finale (you can die in the climactic chapter) (don't worry, there's autosave) followed by a sit-down with the police to prove your case. This takes the form of a plot quiz. Not a resolve the unreliable narration quiz, not a crosswordy reveal the plot through questions quiz, but a straight-up "did you figure out the answer?" quiz.

This is the part of detective games that I suck at, so I went to the walkthrough for the quiz. Which wasn't as helpful as I wanted. The game supports so much variation in what you discover that I was dealing with different quiz questions! In some cases. The walkthrough writer had found stuff that I hadn't found, but also I had found stuff they didn't find. So a bit of frustration there, but it underscores how detailed the implementation is.

And my police case may have been suboptimal, but I got a satisfying epilogue anyway. Go Miss Maple.

Worth playing even if you're not a child of (a specific part of) the 1980s.