Christminster

SPAG
The college is populated with particularly rich characters who play their parts well through the usual sorts of text-adventure interactions. There are good excuses to interact with them along the way, too, provided by a plot which twists along past different personalities. Rees has said that his puzzles are contrived for the purpose of drawing the interactor through the story and into contact with different characters, and that is evident in Christminster. Areas of the setting are consecutively unlocked for exploration, but the whole college is worked into the story very evenly, throughout the narrative.
-- Nick Montfort

In all, though, the small cracks don't mar the soundness of the game. The overall game design is as tight and sensible as just about anything I've seen. Christminster certainly makes my top five of all time, and stands as a classic. I suspect it will hold up well under the test of time. One hallmark of such games is that they make it hard to release a new game with a similar setting, plot, or milieu because the author has so well nailed it down. That seems to be the case here for college campuses and Christminster.
-- David Samuel Myers
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Xyzzy News
There's much to like about "Christminster," from the clever puzzles to the highly interactive NPCs. "Christminster" joins the crowded field of IF games with a collegiate setting, but this one comes in at or near the head of the class.
-- Eileen Mullin
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The Rosebush
Spencer’s floozie: gender and gameplay in Christminster
And yet the entire game is structured by who Christabel is. The who that she is, however, is not so much a history or a voice or a personality, but her relationship to the setting as a whole and to the characters that inhabit it. As we have seen, this allows Rees to set up highly effective resonances between story, puzzles, setting, and character. It is a design space that we have not explored enough; and one where Christminster can still point the way.
-- Victor Gijsbers
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