When Steam launched in the early 2000s and everyone hated the idea of downloading their games, there were only a handful of games available. I remember Dark Messiah being one of the first non-Valve games on the platform. It had a demo which I tried and enjoyed. You were able to kick enemies and watch the physics engine do its magic. I thought, “this is cool” and then promptly forgot about it for a couple of decades.

Well, I’ve finally played the game in its entirety and doesn’t quite stand the test of time. Despite using the Source Engine, it has some pretty bad performance issues. In theory, I should have been able to play this at 1080p with all the bells and whistles turned on. I had to down-res it and go to medium settings and it still had below average frame rates.

Then there is a sluggishness to the controls. Every attack is prefixed with a swirling weapon flourish that just makes everything seem unresponsive. The kicking and throwing physics attacks are still okay, but they are under-utilized and less effective than they could be. Half-Life 2 did it much better.

All that said it’s not unplayable. The levels are (thankfully) pretty on-rails making it a more casual gaming experience than a modern open-world RPG where you are forced to follow quest arrows and talk to boring NPCs. In a bit of a twist, your character isn’t necessarily a good guy. There is a “good” ending, but where’s the fun in that? There’s a lot of unrealized potential in this game and it’s too bad it doesn’t hold up.

The Crimson Diamond is a throwback to early Sierra 3-D adventure games like King’s Quest and Space Quest. Unlike their far-more refined contemporaries at LucasArts, the Sierra games still used a text-based parser instead of a pure point-and-click interface. The text input allows for much more detail in the way puzzles are structured, but it also introduces some major annoyances in terms of guessing verbs in hopes of instigating a particular action.

The Crimson Diamond attempts to mitigate some of these known problems by including quite a few quality-of-life improvements like a notebook and shorthand commands for common actions. Overall the game manages overcome most of the limitations of the mechanics. As far as adventure games go, it was not as difficult as any of the original Sierra titles were but there’s a bit of a twist to that assessment that I will discuss a bit further down.

Much like the very first graphical adventure Mystery House, this is a murder mystery. You play as a mineralogist assigned to investigate if diamonds indeed exist in the remote Canadian forest area of Crimson. You find yourself in a lodge filled with suspicious characters and then shenanigans ensue. The setting is mostly limited to the lodge and grounds around it and the game-play is very process oriented: collect fingerprints, identify footprints, and eavesdrop on conversations.

It’s all wonderfully illustrated and written with quite a few memorable characters. The art style mimics that second wave of Sierra games starting with (I think) King’s Quest IV in which the graphics are still pixelated, the palette is limited, but a slightly higher resolution allows for more detail. That three pixel blob is now a seven pixel blob and it kind-of/sort-of looks like what it’s supposed to be.

Aside from some technical problems (which are slowly getting fixed with each release) my biggest problem with the game was its end-game. I was not prepared for the final interrogation in which I was supposed to type in the names and actions of the guilty parties and much more. The idea here is that it will add replay-ability as you realize all the clues you missed, but I do not have the patience to replay most games, especially an adventure game. I would have preferred if the game had a similar, lower stakes version of this interrogation in the first act to prepare me in advance and make me more aware of the importance of note-taking and the thorough investigation of everything.

But, overall it was enjoyable and more detail oriented players will probably like it quite a bit.