Play it on: steam
Current goal: Solve an old-fashioned puzzle
A few weeks ago I mentioned how I was fascinated by Unacknowledgeda point-and-click adventure from the folks at Wadjet Eye. Well, I finished that one just in time (it was great) as a brand new entry in the genre came out. And while Wadjet Eye’s output is most reminiscent of 90s adventure games that offered full voice acting and sleek drag-and-drop interfaces, this new game, The purple diamond
The purple diamond is perhaps most reminiscent of Sierra adventures, especially the Clara Bow games, in which their brave heroine became involved in crime in the roaring 20s. It plays Nancy Maple, a young woman who investigates the discovery of an unusually large and valuable diamond in a town in northern Ontario, Canada. The trailer already shows that during her investigation she meets people with their own, sometimes sinister, motives and finds herself in considerable danger. I’m in!
People often talk about the evolution of adventure games from text parsers to purely 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 their own strengths. I think there are ways in which the presence of a text parser can encourage creative thinking that a purely graphical interface doesn’t always allow, in addition to immersing you in the plot of The purple diamond