Every Friday, AV Club employees start our weekly open topic for discussing game plans and recent game glories, but of course, the real action is in the comments, where we invite you to answer our eternal question: What are you going to play this weekend?
Today is Christmas, the annual celebration that asks us to contemplate what really matters in life, that is, humanity’s decades-long obsession with murdering Santa Claus, the odious present elf who spends his immortal days judging us, subdividing the species into naughty and good, and usually being a horrible spot on the planet he dominates from his lair literally at the top of the globe. Fortunately (and in fact, we’re always saying that) video games exist, which means that we can translate some of our anti-Santa Claus impulses into action this holiday season. As such, we plunged into the tank of turbulent ideas that is the Steam bargain shelf to remove all the hottest Santa Claus games, many of which at least offer the opportunity to watch Jolly Old Saint Nick spill his metaphorical bowl full of gelatin into the cold, insensitive snow.
So that we are not totally buried in Christmas joy, however, we have established some rules for this rodeo. First, games had to be cheap (because nobody wants to have an HR meeting holly jolly about our efforts to fund a $ 45 package of Santa Claus-themed puzzle games for this idiot What are you playing? bit). They couldn’t be in VR, because as much as we would love to be up close Santa Sling, Santa Simulatorand other great Virtual Santa products, we just don’t have the hardware to do them justice. And they had to be – and that’s always a problem when you get on the cheaper side of Steam offerings – no super horny, which eliminated anime-like offers like Sakura Santa, Santa girls, Strip Black Jack – Santa Claus, Bring me a Santa Claus, of course, Santa’s Big Bag, the game that dares to ask in its Steam marketing copy, “Are you a simp for Santa Claus?”
Anyway, here’s what we found, so let’s dive in. The fat man deserves it.
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Price: Free
“Jingle Bells” MIDI loop? Only on the victory screen, but slaps.
Have you ever asked yourself, “What if Fifteen days happened in a single square of land, in which burly men struggle with katanas to become the next Santa Claus after the previous one died in a burning sleigh accident? ”In that case, this game is for you. Did you play this game? It is disturbing to imagine that several people asked themselves a question that generated this particularly violent and courageous approach The Santa Claus.
Price: Free
“Jingle Bells” MIDI loop? Constantly.
“Oh, cool,” you say to yourself, “A lo-fi look with a Christmas theme Metal Gear. ”“ Wait ”, you ask yourself a few minutes later,“ why does Santa Claus have ‘sleep powder’ to knock out rebellious children? Did that old woman just wake up and shoot Santa Claus? Why are they land mines? Oh God, Dracula is here and he is crazy about his gifts! ”An emotional, fascinating roller coaster would not fail.
Price: $ 1.99 expansion for free Kyle is famous
“Jingle Bells” MIDI loop? Tragically absent
A paid expansion for John Szymanski’s immensely weird text-based game Kyle is famous, KIS it starts with proprietor Kyle expelling dozens of horrible meat-eating elves from his body, and it only gets weirder from there. Are you going to put people in Kyle-Santa’s life on the list of good or bad? Will you create a wide variety of apocalypses by getting reindeer and gifts to come out of Kyle’s neck? Will you be misused as the true symbol of Christmas by a woman having a severe allergic reaction to all that damn elf hair? Only time will tell, dear reader. It’s your choice.
Price: Free, with paid DLC
“Jingle Bells” MIDI loop? No, but the main theme of the battle is a beautiful “Away In A Manger” approach.
Let’s be honest here: We were a little concerned that this freeware RPGMaker title might violate our “no lust” rule, with the unregulated length of Ms. Santa’s skirt. Still, the actual content is healthy enough – give or receive a spicy joke about “snowballs” here or there – while Ms. Santa Claus descends into a cave full of ice to return the toys from the North Pole so that the Santa Claus can take them to people in Time. (Last night was “eggnog night”, so he needs to rest – especially since his relationship with the A lot of Younger-looking Mrs Santa Claus is a very literal romance between May and December.) Bonus points for giving Mrs S an attack called “Season Beats” to kick the shit out of thieves with a little Christmas flair.
Price: $ 6.99
“Jingle Bells” MIDI loop? No MIDI here; this is the game where you touch “Jingle Bells”, in the metal style that it was always meant to achieve.
The premise of Santa Rockstar It’s simple: a generic metal guy finds Santa Claus dead after crashing his sleigh (a shockingly recurring reason in these games) and becomes the new Santa Claus by plugging his electric guitar into the corpse of the dead old elf and struggling. So you spread the Christmas spirit, uh, playing Guitar Hero, except on a computer keyboard, and with touches of metal in “Hark The Herald Angels Sing.” (You can connect a USB Guitar Hero guitar for more “authentic” holiday shredding, though.) In addition, all reindeer now have earrings, which are, in fact, a lot of metal.
Price: $ 0.99
“Jingle Bells” MIDI loop? We don’t really know which Christmas song the only track in the game is trying to be, but we do know that: it’s about 30 seconds long, it’s extremely annoying and will keep repeating until you or he is dead.
The most interesting thing about this extremely simple holiday-themed platform game is the way it describes the underlying tensions of the supposedly peaceful North Pole, like the forces of winter – reindeer, ice and a snowman with a serious case of pervert face– attempt to prevent his ostentatious master, a Santa Claus with butter fingers, from picking up all his fallen toys and taking them to a series of inexplicable independent chimneys. A harrowing portrait of the class conflict between the gift-giving masses.
Price: $ 0.99
“Jingle Bells” MIDI loop? Right on the title screen!
Look: should I have eaten Santa’s Christmas cookies, which were clearly left out for him? Probably not. It justifies him hiding in my bathroom, scaring me with jumps and then dragging me into some kind of boxy Christmas maze, where I can hear him running after me all the time, hoping to really, genuinely scare me with a second care? I would say that this was a overreaction, Santa. Stop playing Slender, take some anger management classes and we’ll try again next Christmas.
Price: $ 0.99
“Jingle Bells” MIDI loop? Somehow, implausibly: No.
A very simple pushing game, Santa’s Workshop has two notable features: a version of Santa’s rosy cheeks that appears to have been ordered directly from a Precious Moments catalog and a player avatar that is, bizarrely, a snowflake. How is the snowflake pushing the toy cars and the candy you are being forced to push into the boxes? Is it a different snowflake on each level, connected to a kind of crystal ice hive? Does Santa Claus have dark powers over ice and winds or is the snowflake being paid for this shit? These are the questions that keep us awake at night.
Price: $ 0.99
“Jingle Bells” MIDI loop? Oh, you better believe it, because nothing says “Let’s shoot Santa in the testicles” like a hard rock loop from “Jingle Bells”
Look, no one is saying it is Fun aim at a horde of furious santa claus, pull the trigger and be rendered with love, Sniper Elite– weird deadly shots showing all the damage you’ve done to Santa Claus’s liver, brain or lungs – that would be sociopathic. But it’s kind of satisfactory. (Even if you have to kill, many, many Santa Claus – the singular “o” in the title being an improper name – to get your hands on any of the game’s top-level Claus killing equipment.)
Price: $ 0.99
“Jingle Bells” MIDI loop? With enthusiasm. Tirelessly, without regret, Wickedly So.
How did Santa Claus get his hands on zombie technology? Why do your zombie elves hate Christmas? Why do these penguins look like they’re lost in flames? None of these questions are answered in this annoyingly slow tower defense game, even though the idea of unleashing “Rudolph’s Rage” to kill a bunch of zombie elves with a laser has a certain bloody, holiday-themed je ne sais quii.
Price: $ 4.99
“Jingle Bells” MIDI loop? None! In fact, the music in the game is uniformly pleasant.
One of the pleasures of making one of these great summaries of tiny games, largely invisible, is that you get one or two occasional gems. Santacraft it’s not amazing – it’s essentially a winter-themed riff in games like Do not starve or Forager– but that It’s steeped in pixel-art charm and a good sense of kindness. Apparently, not all Santa Claus should die: some can coexist with nature. A difficult lesson to internalize, but healthy nonetheless.