I want to believe my childhood box of floppy disks is somewhere out there, waiting for someone who will discover inside the adventure games I pirated in my early days with a computer: the point-and-clicks I managed to understand and love back then, like Loom and The Secret of Monkey Island, and the enigmatic text parser ones, like Police Quest or The Colonel’s Bequest, that went completely over my young non-English-speaking head.

This week, luckily, I got to spend the evenings after work playing The Crimson Diamond by Julia Minamata, and now that whole mystery is what I would consider my first real experience with a text parser game. Nancy Maple rules from the start, and the ending I got left me feeling very inspired, with a desire to go back and finally play through those Laura Bow adventures I missed as a kid. Especially The Colonel’s Bequest, which I also remember finding a bit scary... but surely it’s going to be fine now!