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Review
Overall pretty good, but it has some issues. The beginning is rather confusing until you really sit down and look at the in-game map. You can easily skip important items without realizing and be destined to a "failing" ending. In my opinion, this is just bad game design. To require repeated playthroughs through entire sections of the game for one small mistake made earlier is not interesting or fun. My largest annoyance was that (Spoiler - click to show) (pretty big spoiler ahead) (Spoiler - click to show) the box (containing some gum, a very important item) was mentioned among a bunch of items, whose description hinted that they were not important. It was a time-pressure situation so I ignored it and later needed to restart from an earlier save to get it. You should be able to trust the narrator! Even the hint system does not suggest that you've missed something . However, the game is generally fair; you don't lose the game at every mistake.
There are a few bugs in the descriptions (ie saying something is south when it is really north), many item descriptions are flat or are the default "you see nothing special about...". The game contains a cipher text puzzle, and (Spoiler - click to show) while in-game sources hint at how to solve it, translating the text is nothing but tedious.
Comments on this review
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Christminster should really be viewed in terms of its historical context. In 1995 the idiom was still largely 'games like Infocom did', i.e. large, difficult, time-consuming and unforgiving; new-school ideals of player-friendliness, fairness and unobstructed narrative were just beginning to emerge, and were largely untested. It's not a particularly progressive game for its time -- rather, it's one of the typifying games of that transitional era.
(In other words, your criticisms are perfectly valid, but if they'd been raised in 1995 most IF players would have thought that you were missing the point of IF.)
I understand that it is a product of its era, but regardless of that some games age better than others. I would say Christminster has not aged particularly well, though I still found it enjoyable.
