EGLX 2019: The Crimson Diamond

It’s that time of year again, The EGLX convention. Between October 18th to the 20th, I was down at the Metro Toronto Convention Center, this time in the North Building. This is the same building and show floor as the annual FanExpo, and is fitting for Canada’s largest gaming convention. While I spent the Friday with my wife just browsing around and having a day together, Saturday & Sunday were full of meetings and panels.

The first meeting I had, and the one I knew would be perfect for Digital Roadmap the moment I heard it, was The Crimson Diamond. The game is developed, written and has pixel art by Julia Minamata. The basic plot is geologist Nancy Maple goes to the northern Ontario town of Crimson to investigate reports of a giant diamond find. As you look into the diamond, more secrets and mysteries reveal themselves to Nancy.

The big quirk of this game, and why it excites me so much, is that it’s an EGA text parser graphic adventure. For those who don’t know those terms, think the first Space Quest, Kings Quest, Police Quest, etc from Sierra. Instead of point and click adventures, you have to type your actions into a box at the bottom of the screen. Back in the day, this made puzzles even harder since you didn’t know the exact actions you needed to cite to get the answer.

Julia is, first and foremost an artist, and this shows in the work. She loves working in pixel art and loves the bright colours of the EGA pallet. It shows in how she embraces those restrictions in the game and paint a world that suits an excentric little town from the north. She’s also a self-professed fan of the Colonel’sBequest, the original Laura Bow game from Sierra, and Nancy is very much a Canadian version.

This type of game is the kind I play for fun, and the controls came back to me without thinking. I was able to skip the tutorial and go straight to walking around with the number pad on my keyboard and punching in commands without a second thought. I learned it’s built off of Adventure Game Studio, which is used for some of the Wadjet Eye games and is designed to recreate the controls of the classic systems.

I love seeing a game like this in development. Most of the new-retro games that have been getting made are based on console games, RPGs, platformers, action-adventure games, and the like. This is one of the few that are based on a classic computer genre. Seeing that, and seeing how everyone reacted when I was around the booth showed that there is very much a market for this in the current gaming scene.

One great little moment of note I wanted to talk about, during my time at the booth, a young kid and his father came by to check it out, and the kid took a shot at playing the game. After a bit of time in the tutorial, he found his way around and began understanding the text-based commands very quickly. The only slow down was a limit in his spelling that he was learning very fast as well. For any type of game that I’ve been playing since I was a kid, it’s great seeing others come in and try it without knowing. It shows me how intuitive the design really is.

It’s going to take another year, give or take until the game is out in full, but you can play the demo right now and wishlist it on Steam to show support and be notified of the release. Also, check out the promotional video below.