Previously on The Diamond Mystery of Rosemond Valley: We got jumped in the museum and knocked unconscious, then we found out the not-at-all-totally-obvious-identity of the diamond thief’s Mystery Child, then we found out the identity of the other thief’s Mystery Child. And no one has even paged us on our beeper yet, smh.
We go back to the office and take note of the fact that Malcolm parks in Carla’s space. Heh. Then we approach the alley and see Malcolm there. Suspicious! He claims to have been just taking the trash out (a likely story!) and says he has to leave soon, to help Tom pick up his darkroom equipment. We wibble that he sounds like he’s mad at us, and we totally weren’t being nosy, we just wanted him to meet Mrs. Holmes! “That’s a lie,” Malcolm says. “You were trying to see if your hunch was right.” Hee. He has Emma’s number.
We investigate the alley once Malcolm has gone, and we find…a trenchcoat! What is with the trenchcoat:person ratio in this town? Also, I love that we’re 2/3rds of the way through the game and the only solid lead Emma apparently has is “look out for anyone who owns a trenchcoat.”
We rifle through the pockets and find a key, but the key is bent.
This is our current inventory, for reference.
We want to go back to Vicini to deal with the key. First, though, let’s take note of the replicas/reproductions in Vicini’s displays. He says they’re for the museum, and I was like, “Isn’t displaying replicas like…defeating the purpose of a museum entirely?” However, this is indeed a real thing museums do. The more you know. Vicini says that he is the sole reproductionist for the Rosemond Valley Museum, to which we say, “And I thought you were a criminal.” What? He could still be a criminal, Emma! I see we’re going with the Nancy Drew school of criminology, where if a suspect is like, “I have a semi-plausible explanation for my sketchy behavior”, we’re like, “Well that explains everything and completely absolves you, let’s not investigate it any further.”
Anyway, we have to be nice to Vicini, because we need him to straighten the key for us. Once we’ve gotten that wacky misunderstanding with the diamonds worked out, Vicini is happy to help us fix the key.
With that done, we go back to the office. Can we talk to Bob about anything? Not really, apart from asking why Carla doesn’t like us again, and Bob telling us again that Carla hates the youth.
We go to the darkroom and see that Tom’s new equipment has arrived, but the lens for the enlarger is still missing, so we can’t actually make prints and see any incriminating photos yet.
Back in the main office, we try to talk to Malcolm, but he’s still all salty over us blowing up his secret family. We needle him about wearing his jacket indoors, and Malcolm tells us to quit negging him. “First my hair, now my clothes,” he grumbles. Emma thinks it’s suspicious that Malcolm is always wearing his jacket, even indoors, and surmises that he must be carrying some kind of evidence around. Since we can’t shame him into taking off his jacket, we’ll have to resort to subterfuge.
We go over to the thermostat on the wall and crank it up so that Malcolm has to remove his jacket. He goes to hang it in the hallway, and we can now look at it interrupted.
There’s nothing important in Malcolm’s coat apart from his car keys. Ooh, let’s steal his car! This game came out the same year as Grand Theft Auto: Vice City after all.
Before we jump right into that, let’s take a breather. Do you think Carla still hates us?
“Hi Carla, I thought I’d ask…”
“Don’t think so much! And ask even less! Off you go, and shut the door behind you.” Okay, that answers that.
So we waltz up to Malcolm’s car and crawl into the front seat. And guess what’s in the glove compartment! The diamonds! Wow, that was easy. Malcolm, if you want to be stealth, maybe you should’ve left those somewhere more secure than your car? Like your house?
Malcolm promptly catches us and yells at us for breaking into his car. I mean, is it breaking in if we have the key? Emma’s like, “Well, you broke into the newspaper office and knocked me out at the museum!” Emma! You’re being very blase about confronting someone who gave us a head wound! Malcolm denies it all, and explains what he’s really up to: he was the one who sent us the notes kicking off the investigation; he knew Lucy was Griffin’s daughter and didn’t want to get involved, and he didn’t want to catch any heat by doing it himself. (Re: not asking Tom for help, “He isn’t exactly the sharpest tool in the box.”) So we got a head injury because Malcolm is a cowardly custard. Gotta say, this does not make me want to finish solving the rest of the mystery for you, my dude. Malcolm explains that he thinks there’s a third player: someone else must have double-crossed Parker and stolen the diamonds from him, and Malcolm wants to find out who that is. That’s why he suddenly moved here from the city: “This is where it all started, right? Whoever swindled my dad may still be living here in Rosemond Valley.” Emma muses, “Do you think the person who attacked me and cheated your dad is one and the same?” What is with all this cheated and swindled talk? Captain Parker was also a thief! He stole the diamonds instead of doing his job! He’s not exactly an innocent victim of theft here.
As we know, Parker promised to send for Kit and Malcolm so that they could all move to the West Indies together and presumably hide from the law for the rest of their lives, not that they say the second part out loud. A few months ago, they were told that Parker had died, then a week later they got the diamonds in the mail. Malcolm explains that Parker had just been hiding for the past 20 years, and then he died of a heart attack. Oh. That’s…anticlimactic. Anyway, the diamonds we’re holding are fake, which brings us back to Malcolm’s theory that someone “cheated” his father and stole the real diamonds for themselves. Again, like, I guess that’s true on a technical level, but I don’t know that cheated is the right word for “stole something from a dude who had also stolen it.”
Then Carla comes out and busts us for not doing any work. “Malcolm is selling his car to me,” Emma explains, and Carla yells at us for conducting personal business on the clock. “Malcolm left his notepad in the glove compartment,” we try next. That also doesn’t work, but instead of just ending the conversation, we then try, “Malcolm has just asked us to do research.” This is the same thing as at the hotel; the scene doesn’t end until you’ve gone through every single dialogue option, even though they’re all effectively the same. It’s annoying, because there is no point to making the player go through multiple parallel dialogue trees that all have the same outcome. It doesn’t even make sense from an in-story perspective, either — doesn’t it look suspicious to keep BSing after Carla doesn’t fall for our first excuse?
Whatever. There’s no consequence to giving three clearly fake excuses to Carla in a row; she just yells at us to get back to work, then storms off. We wonder if she overheard what we were talking about, but then we’re like, “Eh, whatever.” We ask Malcolm if he’s disappointed in his no-good-dirty-rotten-diamond-stealing father. Malcolm shrugs that he guesses he is, and he just wants to find out the truth for his mother now: “She’s suffered so.” Are you okay, Malcolm? Is there a reason you’re suddenly talking like a Victorian?
(I don’t want to poke at the translation too much, because I’m sure a studio making games for 9-year-old girls didn’t have an AAA budget for the localization, but…still.)
Malcolm sighs that if only there were a way to prove that the jewels are fake, so we would know he’s telling the truth. Emma’s like, “What a coincidence, I just made friends with this town’s only jeweler earlier today!” We’re about to set off together, but then Malcolm gets a call from Bob, telling him that he needs to go meet the town mayor at the airport for an interview. Malcolm leaves us to go to Vicini’s alone.
Sup, Vicini! This is the beginning of the end of the game, so we’re never going to see you again! We show him the diamonds and he confirms that they are indeed replicas — and moreover, they were made by him. “YOU MADE THEM?!” Emma gasps even though we just confirmed like two hours ago that 1) the museum uses replicas and 2) Vicini is the one that makes them for the museum. We gasp that these must have been stolen too and Vicini’s like, “The fuck are you talking about” and we’re like, “Eh, can’t be fucked to explain it now. Bye!”
The disaffected youths are also gone, so we can’t get their opinions on our hair one last time 🙁
Let’s go see Bob. It was kind of rude of him to send Malcolm off on a story when we’re in the middle of busting crime. We note that it smells like something is burning in his office, and Bob blusters that he smokes sometimes. We want to get him out of his office, so let’s tell him that we received a call from some guy named Parker. Bob clams up and immediately scrams out of there. Let’s go through his stuff!
We look in the trash can and see that Bob wasn’t smoking at all: instead, there’s a burnt scrap of paper that says, “Malcolm knows to [sic] much. He’s…” Oh, Bob. You’re the villain, and you mixed up “to” and “too”? You’re embarrassing yourself.
The key we asked Vicini to fix for us opens Bob’s safe. (When we approach the painting again, Emma will say the same line about Columbo that she says when we first find it in chapter 2.) Inside the safe, we find the missing lens for Tom’s photo enlarger. Why would Bob steal such a thing?!
Hey, do you think we might move up in Carla’s estimation now that one of her employees is, you know, a diamond thief? Just kidding, she’s not here to yell at us anymore. Instead, we go around to her desk and see that there are some imprints on her notepad, so we want to grab the pencil on her desk, and shade over the notepad to see what she wrote. Hey, I recognize this trick! I learned about it from The New Adventures of Mary-Kate and Ashley!
Anyway, we see from the imprint that Carla is the one that wrote the note to Bob, and the full note says: “Malcolm knows too much. He’s the son of Parker and Kit Grace, we have to get rid of him ASAP. Get him out of the way. I don’t care how, just do it quickly. We’re leaving town tonight. Burn this note.” My God! Bob and Carla are both evil! Is the moral of this game “never trust a boomer”? I bet this game was written by disgruntled Gen Xers.
Now for the moment of truth. We go put the lens on the enlarger and we can finally develop our photos. You’ll recall that Emma used up the roll of film after only two photos, and she exposits that actually, the roll was already almost done by the time we got it. When we develop the film, we see there are a bunch of photos from Hawaii, so I guess it must have been Tom’s. Anyway, he took a photo of Carla wearing a necklace with the Treasure Diamond on it. “She and Bob must be in cahoots,” Emma gasps. Oh, I…I thought we already knew that, you know, from her writing that note telling Bob to set Malcolm up with some cement boots? Whatever.
We can also take a look at the other photos on the roll, just for fun. You’ll be relieved to know that Tom’s alibi, “I was too busy perving on girls in Hawaii to be a diamond thief”, checks out.
Everybody has disappeared from the newspaper office, so there’s nothing left to do here…
…so let’s go visit Annie and have another stilted conversation, catching her up on the plot. We blah blah about how Malcolm was sending us the mysterious notes but we still don’t know who actually stole the diamonds. What? Emma, you saw Carla wearing them! Whatever. Then we’re like, “Hey, Annie, we need leftovers,” and Annie offers us soup. Emma says that we don’t want soup because it’s not actually for us to eat, and we go back and forth until Annie offers us some old, janky salami.
The whole point of that is so that we can use the salami to distract Pierre the Piranha, while Emma reaches into his tank and finds the stolen diamonds hidden there. No, at no point during the game was it foreshadowed that the diamonds were in the tank.
At that point, Carla comes back, yelling into her phone about how Parker’s dead and Bob is a total dumbass for falling for Emma’s trick. We have to hide in the closet while Carla comes in and realizes the jewels are missing. She runs off shrieking “My diamonds!!!”
And then! I guess Carla is psychic, because literally the second she leaves the room, we step out of the closet and get a message on OUR BEEPER! Ah yes, after laying dormant all game, the beeper gets to shine at the most dramatic moment of the story <3 Bob and Carla tell us to come to the museum and bring the diamonds if we want to see our sister alive again. Wow, they kidnapped Annie fast.
Like any good adventure heroine, Emma refuses to call the cops. We have to go to the museum alone, and it turns to nighttime when we arrive. The front door is locked, naturally, so we have to walk aaaall the way around the museum and climb up the pipe that we used to escape last time.
If you’re thinking, “Hey, isn’t it kind of hard to see that weird black line in the dark, against a low-resolution building in a 640×480 window?”…yes, yes it is. Not pictured: me walking around the building like three times, trying to remember where tf the pipe was.
Anyway, we finally make it inside, and Emma puts her plan into action, not that the player really knows what it is. We put the diamonds back in the case, but Emma notes that some of the jewels are still missing, so we have to also add Vicini’s replicas to imitate the weight. Then we want to go downstairs and turn the alarm on.
After we set the alarm, the scene automatically fades to black, and we fade in to see Carla, Bob, and Annie. We ask Annie if she’s all right, and she’s like, “Yeah, I’m fine,” in the least urgent voice ever.
And now, we can choose from one of the below options to reveal what our suspects have been up to:
- You and your fishing, Bob. Now you’ve got yourself nicely caught up!
- I didn’t expect that of you, Bob. You can attend your coffee mornings with the Friends of the Museum. [No, I don’t know what this is supposed to mean.]
- You really take the cake, Carla. But this time you’ve bitten off more than you can chew..
- It turns out your watertight plan has sprung a few leaks, Carla. You thought you could be the big fish.
Oh, wait, did I say one? What I actually meant was all of them. As ever, no matter which one you pick, you have to go through every conversation tree to progress. I feel like Bob and Carla are probably getting less intimidated with every second Emma spends making puns and not, you know, calling the cops. I can only assume that the writer spent ages coming up with each joke and was refusing to let them go to waste.
Let’s start with option #2. Bob, how could you do such a thing? I thought you were a Friend of the Museum! Bob pins the blame on Carla like the cowardly custard that he is, blustering that he only wanted to write a story on the jewel theft, but she used her feminine wiles to turn him to evil. Jesus Christ, take some responsibility for yourself, Bob. He explains that they wanted to be the first paper to break the news that the diamonds had been found, so they followed Parker and saw him make off with them. Carla convinced Bob to steal the jewels from Parker instead and replace them with Vicini’s replicas; as chairman of Friends of the Museum, he had a master key to easily get in and out. Emma asks why Bob didn’t just turn Carla and Parker in, and he says, “I was in love with Carla. I didn’t want her to go to jail.” “She really had you wrapped around her little finger,” Emma deadpans. “I realize that now,” Bob replies with an equal lack of emotion. Come on guys, this is the big confrontation of the game. Can you at least try to read your lines with some enthusiasm?
Anyway, Carla evils that they tricked Parker into taking the fall for everything and recording his “confession” on tape, promising to give it to Kit if anything happened to him. Obviously they never did; they ended up just leaving it on the roof for…a reason that is never specified. Well, whatever. Moving on! Where’s Malcolm? Have they set him up with a cement overcoat? Carla says that they’re just going to let him wander around the airport like an idiot while they make their escape; Emma and Annie are the only ones that get the indignity of being murdered by Carla and Bob. Thanks, I guess.
Bob’s like, “Maybe we shouldn’t kill them?” to which Carla snarls, “Don’t be so soft-hearted! How did I ever fall in love with you? Cry-baby!” Bob: “I wonder that too! How could I be so blind. You’re as cold as ice!”
Yeah…this is really awkward for us. Anyway! It turns out your watertight plan has sprung a few leaks, Carla!
She doesn’t say much to that, she just goes on about how she would’ve gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for us meddling kids. Okay, it doesn’t look like there’s much left to talk about, then. We can go now, right?
Nope. Sigh. Okay. “You and your fishing, Bob. Now you’ve got yourself nicely caught up!”
Bob wibbles that he never meant for things to turn out this way, and we point out that he was happy to knock us out at the museum. Bob says that Carla did that, too. So did Bob contribute anything at all to this heist apart from unlocking the museum? Damn, Carla is right. He’s a total deadweight. Carla snarls that she shouldn’t have stopped at knocking us out — “You’re one tough cookie.” “That almost sounds like a compliment,” Emma says. “If you like cookies,” Carla says. What? I don’t know. There is absolutely no urgency to this dialogue, we’re just hanging around rambling about cookies with a couple of diamond thieves.
Bob reveals that he was the one who broke into the newspaper office, because he needed to destroy the incriminating photo of him and Carla in Hawaii. Of course, it was all for naught, as we tell him — the photo was in Emma’s camera the entire time. Bob wails that none of this would have happened if Carla didn’t insist on wearing the diamonds around her neck like a dumbass, and Carla says she needed to get some use out of the jewels, since Bob thought it would attract too much attention to sell them. I mean, he’s right, but also, then what the hell was the point of stealing them? (Carla does explain they sold some of the smaller jewels, which is why we mention that some of them are missing earlier.)
Carla and Bob start arguing about their relationship while Emma and Annie just kind of stand there awkwardly. Eventually Annie protests that she’s tired of being tied up, also in an incredibly flat and lifeless voice. Carla’s like, “Oh, right, I almost forgot about killing you two” and we’re like, “Haven’t you forgotten about the diamonds?” Honestly, I’ve almost forgotten about the diamonds with all this BS going on.
Carla pulls out a gun except it’s not really scary at all because nothing about this game is particularly scary. We direct her to the display case, and because we’ve turned the alarm back on, it goes off when Carla takes them out of the case. A gate comes down over the door, so…now we’re trapped in a room with a woman with a gun, who hates us and has nothing to lose. I feel like Emma didn’t think this through.
Luckily, instead of committing a murder-suicide, Bob and Carla just start bickering over whose fault this is again: “If you hadn’t been so darned stubborn, we would never have ended up in this mess!” Bob says. Carla: “If you hadn’t been such a darned COWARD, we would never have stayed in this backwater! You’re a spineless worm, a total doormat!” Bob says, “And you’re a total piranha, gobbling up everything your way!” Indeed.
We then fade to the diner for the ending video, which Irfanview was unable to hook into unfortunately. We’re hanging out with Malcolm, Kit, Mrs. Holmes, Annie, Tom, and Lucy, and we all have a good chuckle over being held up at gunpoint by our bosses. We close with Emma saying, “Hey, did you guys ever hear this rumor about pirate treasure?” which I guess would’ve been the next game if they’d made another. But they didn’t! The aforementioned Drömjobbet game also came out in 2002, the Pan website’s last update was in 2005, and then they apparently were merged and bought a bunch of times and are now a distributor for other companies’ games in the Nordic region.
All jokes aside, Nancy Drew is an easy reference point for this game, but I don’t think this game is necessarily trying to be Nancy Drew any more than it’s trying to be any other ’90s-2000s mystery adventure game. It’s similar to a lot of other games I remember playing as a kid, like the Saddle Club and Barbie mystery games. It’s also very dialogue-heavy, there are no puzzles in the game and only a small amount of snooping and object-finding. On the one hand, I like dialogue better than futilely trying to push a magnet across a maze or Towers of Hanoi-ing a bunch of water tanks to make a golf cart run. On the other hand, even dialogue can get a bit boring without anything to break it up, and at the end of the day, there’s not much to really do in this game. The most mystery-solving the player has to do is puzzle out who to talk to next or where to use an item. There aren’t any consequences to your actions — failing to do something correctly will only result in the game not progressing or Emma refusing to leave an area; you can’t die or get thrown out of the game.
The story itself is fine; the various characters and their motivations all tie together neatly and the coincidences are largely explained by the entire cast having lived for 20 years in the same town together. It’s a little grittier than other games targeted towards 9-year-old girls, even the passing mentions of infidelity and workplace hookups are spicier than any Barbie mystery game. The execution has a lot to be desired, though — half the plot is telegraphed way too obviously (who is Kit Grace’s mystery child? Is it the only character we’ve seen hanging out with her so far?!) and the other half isn’t telegraphed at all (oh, sure, the diamonds are in Carla’s fish tank, why not). I’ll forgive the dialogue some of its clunkiness, since it was translated from Swedish, but I’ll never be over making the player repeatedly go through functionally the same conversations like 5 times in a row. I had pretty much stopped giving a shit about the diamond theft by the time I was being forced to make my 3rd fish pun at Carla and Bob at the end.
All that said, I do still think the town is well-designed and enjoyably immersive, and there’s some genuine humor in the writing — the running jokes about Carla’s violation of labor laws and the town obsession with fishing came up just often enough to be funny without overstaying their welcome. It would’ve been cool if this series had continued and done a bit more with the investigative-journalism aspect, but tbh, I can see why this game didn’t get a sequel.
THE END.
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