The Crimson Maid puts you in the shoes of Marius, a young man training for the priesthood who returns to his childhood home after discovering that his father is seriously ill.
So naturally, one of the first major complications is an attractive maid.
Probably not in the seminary handbook, that one.
Irina has recently joined the household, and it does not take particularly long for Marius to notice her. From there, you are given plenty of opportunities to decide exactly how committed our young cleric really is to avoiding temptation, while a much darker mystery slowly develops around the family.
It is a strange mixture on paper. Period drama, romance, murder, religion, supernatural weirdness and light puzzle solving all crammed into a game you can comfortably finish in an evening.
Somehow, though, it mostly works.
The story keeps just enough hidden
The story is probably the strongest reason to keep moving through The Crimson Maid.
You return home to a family that clearly has history, resentment and secrets bubbling beneath the surface. Your father is deteriorating, your mother is hardly the warmest presence in the house, your younger brother has his own problems, and then there is Irina, who becomes increasingly important depending on how you choose to behave around her.
And yes, I went down the romantic route.
What can I say? I’m apparently a sucker for a woman willing to flash her breasts at me.
There are a couple of opportunities for Marius to become rather less priestly than his career path might suggest, but what surprised me was that the romance is not simply there for a few naughty scenes and then forgotten about. Your choices feed into what happens later, and after one particularly romantic evening, The Crimson Maid delivered a twist the following morning that genuinely caught me off guard.
I will not say what happens because it is much better experienced without knowing.
But it got me.
That is harder to do than it once was. After years of films, games and television chucking every possible betrayal, murder and dramatic reveal at us, you start spotting these things coming from miles away. The Crimson Maid managed to sneak one past me, and although it was certainly not a pleasant surprise for Marius, it was a very welcome one as a player.
It feels like an adventure game from another era
Playing The Crimson Maid kept taking me back to the story-driven puzzle games I loved in the early 2000s.
Broken Sword 3 came to mind more than once.
Not because The Crimson Maid is anywhere near as large or complicated, but because there is something familiar about wandering through relatively contained locations, talking to everyone, examining whatever looks suspicious and slowly piecing together what needs doing next.
The environments are not huge, and I actually think that works in its favour.
You have the mansion and surrounding estate to explore, with documents, collectables and optional bits tucked away for anyone who wants to poke their nose into every corner. But it never reaches the point where finding a missing item means spending the next hour combing through miles of empty scenery wondering what the hell you overlooked.
There is enough room to explore.
Not enough to waste your life.
It is a pretty nice place for terrible things to happen
The Crimson Maid is not going to melt your graphics card, but it looks good.
The mansion and its grounds are probably the highlight. There is a nice period feel to the locations, and the environments generally have enough detail to make wandering around enjoyable rather than simply feeling like corridors connecting conversations.
Character models are decent too.
Nothing here is visually mind-blowing, but nothing really needs to be. It has a coherent style, the setting suits the story, and there are enough nice-looking areas that stopping for a moment to take everything in never feels like a waste of time.
For a relatively short narrative game, it does what it needs to.
Please, Marius, stop talking for five minutes
Where things become harder work is the dialogue.
There is a lot of it.
That makes sense for a game that leans heavily into visual novel territory, and talking to people is obviously how you learn more about the family, uncover information and progress the mystery. If you want to understand everything properly, you are going to spend a fair amount of time working through conversation options.
The issue is that not all of those conversations feel equally worthwhile.
Sometimes you get useful information or something that adds nicely to a character. Other times, it feels like you are wading through text simply because another dialogue option is sitting there waiting to be clicked.
I will admit that, eventually, I started hammering through some of it.
There is only so much patience I have when a conversation has stopped feeling like it is adding anything meaningful, and because dialogue takes up such a large chunk of a fairly short game, those slower moments stand out.
Tightening some of that up would have done wonders for the pacing.
The puzzles know when to push back a little
I had a much better time with the puzzles.
They are mostly quite approachable, but crucially, The Crimson Maid does not seem terrified of letting you get stuck for a few minutes.
That is something I miss.
Too many modern games practically solve puzzles for you before you have even had time to look around. Your character starts muttering clues, an objective marker appears, the important object glows bright yellow and somewhere a developer presumably reaches through the screen to hold your hand.
The Crimson Maid is happier to let you work things out.
Nothing here is going to have puzzle veterans launching controllers across the room, but there are enough moments where you actually need to stop and think. The graveyard gate in particular had me scratching my head for a while before I properly understood what I was meant to do.
And that little moment of finally getting it right feels far better than simply being handed the answer.
The difficulty feels about right for the type of game this is. Accessible without being completely brainless.
Multiple endings do not always mean multiple playthroughs
The Crimson Maid also offers multiple endings based on the choices you make, which would normally be an obvious reason to jump straight back in.
Strangely, I did not really feel the urge.
I enjoyed the route I took. I liked seeing where Marius and Irina’s relationship led, and the twists along the way kept me invested through to the ending. But once the credits arrived, I did not have that immediate feeling of needing to reload and discover every other possible outcome.
Part of that is probably the amount of dialogue.
Knowing I would have to work through a lot of familiar conversations again makes another run less tempting, even if the eventual destination would be different. The Crimson Maid is short enough that replaying it would hardly be a massive commitment, but the alternative endings were not enough to drag me immediately back.
That does not make them pointless.
It just means the journey was more important to me than seeing every possible destination.
Final thoughts on The Crimson Maid
The Crimson Maid is a good little throwback to a type of adventure game we do not see quite as often anymore.
There is a solid mystery at its centre, the romance adds another layer to Marius’ story, and the game managed to genuinely surprise me at a point where I thought I had a decent idea of where things were heading.
The exploration works because the environments are large enough to hide secrets without becoming tedious. The puzzles offer just enough resistance to make solving them satisfying. And despite the visuals not being anything revolutionary, it is a generally attractive game with a setting that fits the story nicely.
It just talks too bloody much.
Some of the dialogue could have been trimmed without losing anything important, and that slower pacing is probably the biggest thing stopping me from wanting to immediately dive back in and chase the alternative endings.
But I enjoyed my few hours with it.
If you miss those older story-driven adventure games, enjoy a murder mystery and do not mind a bit of temptation getting in the way of somebody’s relationship with God, there is plenty here to like.
The Crimson Maid is worth exposing yourself to.
Quite literally in a couple of scenes, as it happens.
The Crimson Maid was released on July 14th, 2026. It is developed in partnership by GrimTalin and Darkania Works, and is published by Wales Interactive. You can play it now on PC, PlayStation and Xbox.
Want to see what other games we’ve been playing? Head over to our Games reviews section.
