Some thoughts after finishing this (9.5 hours according to Steam):
- I really enjoyed this, honestly more than I expected. While I like Sierra-style parser-based adventure games, Colonel’s Bequest is one of my least favorite ones and Crimson Diamond improves on it in some ways. There is more to actually “do” here – you still spend a lot of time talking with people and gathering clues, but this time you also have real adventure game puzzles to solve that move the plot forward. You also don’t have to worry as much about moving the game clock forward before you’re ready – the game is pretty good about telegraphing when a major event is going to happen, and it seemed more flexible about the timing of when you can see/hear/talk about things
- Graphics and sound are Sierra SCI0 quality and very nice. The scenes are detailed enough for you to often use your own eyes to notice when something has appeared or changed, rather than needing to “search” every object again every time you start a new chapter. Also you walk extremely fast here and can go from screen to screen in about 3 seconds
- The parser worked pretty well. There were only 2 - 3 times when I couldn’t get it to understand what I wanted to do after a few tries, and it handles multiple objects of the same type well if not perfectly
- There is a notepad for keeping track of important findings and goals, although they’re all combined together and I found it difficult to use effectively after the first few chapters
- There were several times when the game acted like I just figured out something new, when in fact it was the third or fourth time I had learned this. In some cases the game failed to update my notepad until I learned the same thing multiple times. It never caused a serious problem but it did make for some repetitive dialogue
- You can die in this game, but it’s generally only after you do something obviously dangerous or stupid. This death message cracked me up more than it should have:
- SJW watch: The women and minorities in the game have their differences acknowledged but are mostly treated like normal characters. I liked how the one Japanese character is
treated with suspicion for no real reason. Your character is often told to do things like “go to the kitchen,” which I found more amusing than what was probably intended
- I got a very good but not perfect ending, mainly because I didn’t pick up every piece of evidence I encountered even after I fully examined it
I have mixed feelings about the ending itself –
you have a big decision at the end of the game, and IMO the outcomes with the clearly “good” and “bad” choices are more extreme than they needed to be. Yes, yes, we all know capitalism sucks, but something more balanced may have worked better. Did we really need to find buried treasure after taking the idealistic-but-poor “good” route? 
- There were a few bugs, including a couple of CTDs and several times where I’d enter a command and the game would act like nothing happened (in one case when doing something that the notepad specifically told me to do)
- I’m curious where the geology fixation in this game came from…
- I came away with a good impression of the author, Julia Minamata. While I didn’t follow the development of the game beyond what I could read here and on the Steam page, it seems like she got support for the game based mainly on her dorky love for the genre (and apparently classic RPGs - she was a Skald backer) without relying on anything sexy or feminist. Not a simp but tempted...
Overall I’m very glad this finally arrived and turned out the way it did. I hope it's successful and leads to more parser-based games like this, ideally using a different Sierra game for inspiration. Let’s see Codename: ICEMAN done right!
