Christminster

Play it if: you want to play a medium-length game emphasizing clean, forgiving gameplay and a detailed, engaging setting.

Don't play it if: you want plot-heavy IF that hits the narrative highs of later masterpieces such as Anchorhead.

Christminster to me suffers from the rather thankless role of being a classic game overtaken by its successors. It's a shame because in many ways Christminster is contemporary in its design: lower on cruelty and higher on fairness than most of the Infocom classics. In that respect it's the sort of game that will outlive the Zork series, whose entries will more often than not frustrate the contemporary player in spite of their positive attributes.

I think it comes down to the balance between puzzle-solving and storytelling. For every area in which Christminster presented clean, quality gameplay, there's another area in which it falls just a little bit short in its narrative. Yes, the puzzles have both variety and verisimilitude, depending as much on the manipulation of characters as on that of everyday objects. Yes, they're (mostly) well-clued and engaging enough to keep you playing through to the finish. But then I have to stop and wonder why I'm researching the alchemical history of the university when I should be demanding a police investigation into my brother's disappearance. (Spoiler - click to show)And concocting the Elixir of Life is all very well and good for a puzzle, but what is going through Christabel's mind when she is making it? What is the connection between making the Elixir and saving her brother?(Spoiler - click to show) These sorts of details by no means ruined the game, but they did prevent me from really connecting with Christabel and by extension the actual plot.

The thing is that Christminster feels like a prototypical version of Anchorhead. I know it's not really fair to judge one game by the standards of another, but Anchorhead, which might be considered this game's spiritual successor, really did do it better. The personal stakes are higher, the environment is more atmospheric, the backstory and research more detailed and engaging. Christminster paddles along at a good pace in terms of gameplay, but the plot itself changes very little between the beginning and end; nothing of real emotional significance happens until the ending, and there is little build-up to the climax. It works more as a string of well-connected puzzles than as an actual story, whereas Anchorhead managed to balance both of those elements.

So is it a masterpiece? For its time, yes; and even now it has aged extremely well - the original release was in 1995, but it may as well have been yesterday (barring a couple tell-tale gaps in implementation). So it's still entirely worthwhile as a game, if not as engrossing a story as it could have been.

There's a long-standing joke about Shakespeare being overrated: "It's just a bunch of moldy old quotes and worn-out cliche." The joke, of course, is that these "old quotes" and cliches originated with Shakespeare in the first place -- it's their genius that has caused them to echo through the ages and be endlessly recycled in lesser works.

Playing Christminster today, it can indeed seem overrated. It's very hard to appreciate how amazing it was in its original context for someone who wasn't there, and because the game had such an impact on the form -- its best ideas diffusing out to redefine the ideal -- most of its achievements are easy to take for granted, if they're even noticed at all.

I had tried this game several times in the past and always put it aside after 20 minutes or so of absolutely zero progress. This time I was determined to get somewhere so eventually broke down and used hints. It felt like pulling teeth to get to the first important solution even then; there are 10 separate hints regarding the critical initial puzzle (fully 22% of all hints provided by the game). When the nature of the puzzle became clear, I found myself swearing out loud.

I went on to finish the game, sometimes running into more brick walls that exacerbated my grumpiness, but in between bouts of that I started to notice some of the work's cleverest parts. After finishing, I prepared a somewhat scathing review enumerating the game's many deficits. It wasn't until I reviewed the varied commentary on the game available from its IFDB page -- and dissected its source for fact-checking purposes -- that I started to have a change of heart. I had expected to find discussion of its flaws, but instead I encountered praise for its innovations in terms of NPC design, puzzle fairness, and story integration.

Before continuing, I am forced to acknowledge is that this is a very well-developed work by the standards of its time, and that it hails from the earliest days of the hobbyist era and therefore long predates modern conventions of player-friendliness. This work set new standards for many aspects of the ideal model of IF, and it did so using a less capable toolset than we have today. STILL... if you're trying to enjoy this game in the here and now, then you may, as I did, find parts of it to be seriously obnoxious. Very probably, you will also, as I did, find parts of it to be uniquely enjoyable and impressive.

If the game has one major problem in its design, it's the overall lack of consistency. To me, consistency is the most essential element of puzzle design and the fundamental backstop of fairness; when an author is consistent, the player can learn his or her style and adjust thinking accordingly. It may take a few cycles of misreading clues to catch on, but usually after two or three one is close enough in mindset to make good progress. If the required perspective is not a natural one, it might be necessary to consult hints or walkthroughs a few more times on the way to completion, but I personally consider a little "spoilage" to be a good tradeoff when the alternative is abandoning the work. After all, puzzles have their own aesthetics, appreciation for them is subjective, and a work of interactive fiction can be judged on other qualities such as story, writing and deftness of implementation.

Christminster lacks the necessary consistency in many places, and it was infuriating whenever one of these bare spots brought progress crashing to a halt. The thing is: Upon further study many of what I thought were gaps in the implementation turned out to be just gaps in my understanding rooted in incorrect assumptions. These assumptions were ones that I had made for what I thought were good reasons, and it may be worthwhile to share why.

The prologue puzzle, which consists of getting into the college, is a study in miniature. In a recent Rosebush article, Victor Gijsbers illustrates the way that this puzzle embodies the spirit of exclusion animating the fictional setting of Biblioll, but I hesitate to give credence to the idea that its design was consciously intended to do so.

(Spoiler - click to show)The game does not exactly play fair here. While a survey of the environs quickly gives the experienced player the idea that it might be possible to get a feather from the parrot to use in obtaining the key, and the interaction takes pains to alert the unobservant player to the existence of a suitable missile, the coding of the two NPCs offers no similar cluing. Indeed, their algorithms give every indication of being simple, typical-for-the-era automatons engaged in cyclic activity, and little else.

Although the player is obviously invited to interact with them by their very presence, the NPCs' ASK/TELL conversation capability is sparsely implemented and doesn't add much to their apparent intelligence. After a few low hit-rate "conversations" there seems to be little else to do with them. To the extent that either shows any goal-directed behavior, it's that the constable always shows up and lingers indefinitely when you are in the vicinity of the window. The source code, graciously provided by author Gareth Rees, shows that this behavior is intentional, and it yields the strong impression that the constable is keeping a special eye on the PC as a possible source of trouble.

There is some slight hinting that the constable is interested in the magic show, but his obvious puzzle-relevant behavior implies that he prioritizes his watchman duties over casual entertainment. This, in combination with the street magician's explicit request for a small item for his trick -- along with the wholly irrelevant interaction he exhibits with any of the three smallish objects obviously available during the prologue (i.e. cobblestone, telegram and map) -- all provide consistent feedback that there is no significant progress to be had from them.

The single solution is for the PC to give her handbag to the street magician, who will refuse to use it in the trick but will provide a toffee in response. The toffee can be given to the constable, and the constable told to give it to the street magician, who will proceed to go through his routine with it before the constable eats it.

But... so what? Even if this interaction is discovered (most likely through brute force interaction), there is nothing in the prior behavior of the constable to suggest that he will simply forget all about his duties and remain transfixed while the PC goes about a bit of ballistic vandalism. The constable's part of the dialogue exhibits the same sort of detached chipperness that he has in all interactions with the protagonist, and there's nothing to signal any particular level of fascination on his part.

I'm not sure that this solution would ever have occurred to me, though I suppose I might have eventually discovered -- purely accidentally -- that a period exists in which the PC can act in the critical site unobserved. Perhaps this is a cultural difference; perhaps it would simply be unthinkable in Britain for a police officer to leave a peformance abruptly in order to prioritize doing his job. However, I agree with Gijsbers that this feels like an intentional (if not conscious) design element, which strikes me as an attempt to turn away the casual player.

Even worse, having secured the feather, the don -- who sleeps like the dead up to this point -- almost immediately wakes up after the PC takes his key. It's necessary to wait through another cycle of the street magician's patter to get to where he is asking for an object, then grab the key and pass it to the magician. The magician will cooperate in hiding it, and the don will wildly accuse you of having stolen it, resulting in the don's arrest and the removal of both the don and the constable from the scene.

This is a functionally separate obstacle, and coming back-to-back with the distraction puzzle it effectively negates any sense of victory that the player might have had in gaining the key. It almost feels like truculence on the game's part. Opening puzzles set a game's tone and style, and shape player expectations. In this case, my own expectations were shaped to expect maximum pointless friction, making finishing the game into an unappealing prospect.

I have thoroughly spoiled that puzzle because it is, it turns out, considerably out-of-character with respect to the majority of the other puzzles found in the game. (Spoiler - click to show)(... Though on reflection, there does seem to be a divide in the fairness level between puzzles that involve the environment and puzzles that involve NPCs; the latter frequently provide feedback to the player that seems misleading in nature. Perhaps that says something about the author's view of human nature?) Although there are a handful of what I would label last lousy points to be had, these are described by the author as optional, and the ending is in no way affected by missing them beyond showing a lower final score. (Note that although I am a completionist at heart, I would not recommend trying to suss out these last points at the game's command prompt. They are by far the least fair puzzles in the game, and they collectively would suggest a certain thread of perverse cruelty running through the design if they had any impact on the best ending.)

Once past the wicket gate, the game's greatest weakness is its firm commitment to offering only the mathematically minimum possible hinting. I observe that this approach seems to be typical of British games, but, in general, coupled with that style is the notion that the player should never be in a position to say that the necessary information was not presented. The high art of the mode is presenting the needed information in a manner so subtle that someone not paying close attention can easily miss it. Fair is fair, and in several cases I was simply outfoxed. However, in a couple of situations I think Rees provides too few hints to be fair for plot-critical challenges. These are:

1. The bible -- (Spoiler - click to show) Here I'm talking about both the illuminated copy found in the Chapel and the standard King James version that can be found in the Library. Obtaining the latter is one of the unfair last lousy point puzzles: The player is expected to look up 'God' in the card index to find it, and this is the only way to obtain the item. (This is an index of surnames, mind you, and variants that one might expect based on actual names for the deity are not found.) Comparison of a critical passage of the KJV to the illuminated copy's version will give the linguistically-oriented player an indirect clue about a key alchemical ingredient. Lacking the ability to read Latin -- something that presents no real obstacle in the era of online translators but required an increasingly-rare classical education at the time of the game's release -- the player must get along with some knowledge of root words to compare the English version and notice the extra phrase in the illuminated version. As a last-ditch option, one can theoretically just notice the word 'myrrheum' and assume it means myrrh, but the first time this is encountered the player is unlikely to know that myrrh can be found in the game and is probably unmotivated to try deciphering each incomprehensible word individually. Later, at the point at which the player is most likely to want to revisit the passage in-game, it's gated by a second aggravating puzzle involving the beekeeper's veil. (The problem here stems from the treatment of hat and veil as a single object in the description text, i.e. responding identically to both >X HAT and >X VEIL. Per modern conventions, this generally means that the object in question is atomic and indivisible, but I don't know how consistently that was the case in the mid-1990s. Without assuming malice, I'll just note that it's very much a "gotcha" for the player of today.)

2. The student and the professor -- (Spoiler - click to show)On first encountering this NPC, you'll see the following: "'You must help me to find my parrot,' pleads Edward. 'Just tell me which way I should go.'" In obeying your directional instructions, it's implied that he is for some reason willing to submit to your authority temporarily, but he is prone to wander off immediately after going any direction that you give. Telling him to wait or stop doesn't seem to do anything. He will respond to only a few non-movement commands, and in only one case will he actually perform the action. It's made abundantly clear that he has no desire to see Bungay, even blanching should they happen to cross paths in the aftermath of the scene in Malcolm's room, and it's also made clear that Bungay keeps his door locked and wants no visitors. It really seems to require a latent desire to punish the hapless student to even conceive of the goal of forcing him to his "supervision," since it's not possible to know that the only method of entering the gardens is through Bungay's quarters. Even after having read the solution in the walkthrough, I was grinding my teeth in annoyance trying to shepherd Edward across the map and get the timing right to trigger their encounter -- a process made even more gratuitously difficult by the need to not be there when Bungay opens his door. It turns out that >EDWARD, FOLLOW ME does wonders to smooth this process -- I just didn't guess that he would be capable of responding, and I hadn't read the introductory help text that uses the >FOLLOW verb as an example. Most importantly, there does not appear to be any way to know that Bungay's door will be unlocked after inviting in the student; I double-checked, and there is not even the "negative information" cue of there being a different sound (e.g. minus the locking action) when the professor closes his door. Parked squarely on the critical path for the game, this sequence is even more off-putting than the prologue. Further, the method for gaining access to the desk drawer, an optional puzzle yielding a pair of last lousy points, requires moving the desk. Moving desks is a pretty noisy activity -- obviously not something to do when trying to be stealthy, as the PC well knows -- and doing so gives no indication that the drawer is now accessible. Only inspecting the drawer from within the gap will reveal the possibility.

Those aren't the only problematic points in the work, but they are the ones that caused me the most grief. Every snag that I encountered arose from either a complete absence of hinting (or hinting so miniscule as to blend in with other insignificant text) or implementation that provides no relevant feedback (or sometimes misleading feedback). I won't nitpick here, but my suggestion to prospective players would be to set a time limit in advance for being stuck, and to consult the hints whenever that limit is reached; this will give you a chance to experience the best parts of the game without undergoing too much frustration.

I suppose the laundry list of complaints above may seem hard to reconcile with my ostensibly positive attitude about the game. The thing is: Christminster has highs to match its lows. Rees shows in several places that he can craft subtle, inventive and unique puzzles whose solutions are pure delights to discover and for which the hinting is unquestionably fair. I'm intentionally going to say nothing about these gems, because I want you, the reader, to be able to discover and experience them without prejudice.

To explain more fully: I realize that it's tremendously unjust to criticize Rees for not solving every problem that plagued the old school style in one stroke. This game incorporates many features that may well be firsts for the form: automatic opening of doors (which required modification of the Standard Library), use of narrative time as opposed to clock time in a story spanning both day and night, reasonably intelligent "talking" NPCs with whom realistic cooperation is necessary to solve puzzles, objects used as part of the solution to multiple puzzles, alternate solutions to some key puzzles, and more. Having inspected the solid and well-organized source code, it appears that most of what I'm calling shortcomings could be addressed by either trivial or very modest effort. I'm mostly in agreement with Jim Kaplan's review, and I think he's right that with such minor adjustments in place Christminster would be very well-regarded were it to be released for the first time today.

Though this game often falls short of my idea of real fun when considered as a whole, there is much to admire in the best craft on display, and even its flaws offer pointed lessons in what to avoid (as well as opportunities to imagine alternatives). It is indisputably worth studying as part of a review of the history and evolution of the form, and any player willing to accept its contrasts with respect to modern ideas of fairness is sure to have an enjoyable experience. I'm torn between wanting to give it 3 stars for how it plays by modern standards and 4 stars for how prominently it stands out in the context of its original release. I'm going with the latter on the basis of its substantial impact on the form; if nothing else, this is a work to reckon with.

In thinking of great IF I keep coming back to this one - it's puzzley but not too puzzley, it executes set-pieces in a way that might even have been novel for its time, and it balances progression and frustration excellently. Add to that the well-rendered setting that changes over time, the characterised NPCs and I think you've got something really special. One of my all-time favourites.