Christminster

by Gareth Rees

Collegiate, Mystery
1995

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- Thrax, March 11, 2015

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Classic Oxbridge College adventure, February 6, 2015

In 2015, Christminster is almost 20 years old. It's closer in time to the Infocom classics than to the present and this is getting truer and truer. Trying to compile it from source requires digging out the Inform 5 compiler (which seems to crash with a segmentation fault?). The real question is how has it aged? Is it a timeless classic or a period piece?

I think the evidence is clear that it's at the very least a timeless near-classic. One can recognize a game that plays with Inform's new-for-the-time capabilities in what may now seem a stylized fashion, but which for its time must have been new and fresh. The important point is that the story holds up. The writing is witty, the puzzles are well-structured, and the whole thing fits together.

The most impressive quality for me though is the near-perfect timing and coherence of the whole. This is the definitive Oxbridge College adventure. The College feels right, the buildings look right, the eccentric Dons are right. The setting is some ill-defined post-war period; perhaps the point is it could be any time between say 1945-1954 (post-war, no mention of rationing) and 1972-1988 (women are admitted to mens' Colleges). The very timelessness is critical, and the author uses this, for example in the prologue which mentions strawberries. There are also a Chapel, a punt, a garden.

Particularly effective is the use of time. The game's structure uses the player's achievements to advance the clock. Within the different episodes, there is flexibility, however. The underlying plot is the driven forward by certain actions with irrevocable consequences (it is possible to get stuck in a non-winning situation). The hint system becomes vaguer with time. I certainly peeked at the source code a few times. I had not played the game for a long time and thought I remembered the winning sequences, but I was mistaken (a good thing, I would argue).

Getting all the points is not easy, but the game is fair in the sense of Chekov's Gun. Everything that is of later importance is indicated in some fashion. Possibly not the a reference to the Meldrew family buried in the game, but that is not actually needed. A tribute to Curses and to the origin of Inform.

Finally, while the author explains the origin of Christminster and Biblioll, it is an interesting exercise to see whether the setting is more like Cambridge or Oxford. The use of the word "supervision" suggests Cambridge, as does the river flowing South to North, although there are no historical Cambridge colleges on the west bank of the Cam. And the name Biblioll is of course based on Balliol, while it is older than Cambridge. In the end, it doesn't matter because the disparate elements come together and one is immersed in what feels like a College.

One of my favorite (Christminster spelling) games every. Every student of Inform should play it at least once.

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- morlock, January 15, 2015

- Snave, December 9, 2014

- ngmiller (Boulder, CO), June 9, 2014

- lisapaul, January 10, 2014

- KidRisky (Connecticut, USA), December 25, 2013

- Adam Myers, October 6, 2013

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
Very good, but bettered by its successors, June 10, 2013
by Jim Kaplan (Jim Kaplan has a room called the location. The location of Jim Kaplan is variable.)
Related reviews: gareth rees

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.

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- luftmensch (Germany), May 8, 2013

- o0pyromancer0o, November 13, 2012

- Puddin Tame (Queens, NY), October 27, 2012

- E.K., May 31, 2012

- Audiart (Davis, CA), February 28, 2012

- deathbytroggles (Minneapolis, MN), January 30, 2012

- MonochromeMolly, December 5, 2011

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
This game is so good, I'm reviewing it before I finish!, September 10, 2011
by Deboriole (San Diego, CA)

I almost didn't play this game because of its title (I am not that interested in religion and/or history), but I decided to give it a go. I was hooked from the very first puzzle! The story is intriguing and the puzzles are varied and plentiful. The hint system is perfect - there are clues available, but they are very loose so you need to actually use your brain. I felt more accomplished upon solving these puzzles than most any other game I have played.

Finding the solutions takes some effort, but everything is completely logical (and solvable) if you pay attention. There is a lot of "looking up" facts or people in books, but I just started jotting down every surname I came across and managed to progress just fine.** I definitely recommend playing the game and sticking to only the in-game hints (plus my spoilers, since I could have used them!). It is a very satisfying experience when you get past each obstacle. The one puzzle in the game that completely eluded me was the wire puzzle. Spoiler alert...
(Spoiler - click to show)I thought only one wire could be connected to any one socket. I thought the two wires in each receptacle were an "in" and an "out". It never occurred to me to plug multiple wires into any one socket! Electrician, I'm not.

** Ironically after I posted this review I became very, very stuck. I broke down and found an online walkthrough. Unfortunately I had made two crucial mistakes that prevented me from finishing the game this time. :( Even so, I still give the game 5 stars for its sheer genius!
My mistakes are listed below in a spoiler.
(Spoiler - click to show)Mistake #1: I mixed several liquids together since I only had a few containers. You need to keep everything separate until the end of the game because they are "ingredients." My advice is to pick up every container and every liquid you can find. Mistake #2: I gave away the Egyptian book before using it to look things up. Its new owner left partway through the game, so I was never able to recover it.

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- Lucifalle, September 6, 2011

- Mr. Patient (Saint Paul, Minn.), August 3, 2011

0 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
OK, not great. , August 3, 2011

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.

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- calindreams (Birmingham, England), July 14, 2011

- David Kinder, June 7, 2011

- snickerdoddle, January 27, 2011

- mojay, December 13, 2010

- Alder (San Francisco), August 15, 2010


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