It’s Christmas, which means lots of togetherness, family, and opening a box from Amazon and realizing they didn’t include everything you ordered so now you gotta contact customer service and you know that crap ain’t coming until January. The thing is, I’ve always loved Christmas to an unhealthy extent. Although not that Christmas Club in One Battle After Another, because, honey, they would not like me for a whole lot of reasons. Christmas is just such a fun, cheerful time, even with its tragedies and difficulties and parental hell.
They say you can never go home again and that’s true. You can’t. I burnt your home down and built a Raising Cane’s over it. But I’ve always wanted to recapture that childhood feeling of magic. Not just the joy of giving beautiful gifts to someone you love or receiving weird gifts from someone you love but apparently doesn’t know much about you other than ‘video game fan’. I’m just saying, I’ve been given a lot of controller-shaped novelty mugs and not a one of them is actually usable due to the physics of liquids.
Where was I? Oh, Christmas. Childhood joy. That feeling of excitement and fear and worry and eagerness and hoping mom is too tired to make you go to Christmas mass. So I’ve created a list of Christmas-themed games that bring out that feeling of childhood joy in me. Some new, some old, all going into my rotation like the best television Christmas specials. But each of them is going to make you feel like a kid running down the stairs before getting screamed at to go back to sleep.
Parasite Eve
Parasite Eve takes place around the Christmas season. We know this because in the opening scenes of the game, we get a shot of a giant tree with an ornament that reads ‘Merry Christmas 1997’. Big clue there. And then the bad lady uses mitochondria to set a bunch of people in nice clothes on fire at the opera. That really becomes the bigger focus of the game, for better or worse.
So why is Parasite Eve on the list then? Because it’s a horror RPG that takes place during Christmas. It contains what every child dreams of: inheriting super powers for Christmas. Forget getting video games or board games or board games based on video games.
And Christmas itself is a spooky holiday! The Victorians used to tell ghost stories around December 25th. There’s a magical spookiness everywhere. The city is empty! The zoo is empty! With the holidays you’ve got free run of the Natural History Museum. Hell, even the police station is empty. It’s just you, a few helpful other cops, Manhattan, super powers, and blowing up mutated monsters of God’s birthday. No child would choose anything else.
Santa Claus in Trouble HD
This is a remaster of an older game from the early 2000s. Maybe you remember it. It’s kind of a weird, semi-okay 3D platformer in which you collect gifts. It’s not bad or broken by any means, but if you finish this game, you actually become the next Santa Claus. They changed the rules where you don’t have to kill the last one like in the Tim Allen movie. That was based on real reporting, you know.
I’ve got Santa Claus in Trouble HD on the list because it’s exactly the type of cheap, free game kids both past and present play around the holidays. Most of you probably don’t remember getting holiday shareware gifts with hundreds of Christmas-themed games, all of which were truly horrible ripoffs of more popular titles.
That’s how I feel playing Santa Claus in Trouble HD. It’s not an amazing game, or a great game, or a good game, but it is nostalgic. It’s the type of thing your parents shove in front of you to shut you up about Santa. Thankfully, moms and dads have kept that tradition alive to this day.
Tetris Effect
I don’t even know if it’s Christmas themed, but that stage of Tetris Effect where there’s a bunch of twinkling ornaments feels pretty December 25th-y. Either way, it gave me chills the first time it hit in virtual reality, a sentence that should never be repeated by an adult.
Big Trouble In Little Chimney
There are actually few roguelite games featuring Santa. Also, Vampire Survivors has clearly sold a lot of indie developers on reverse bullet hells. The best way to make money in the video game industry is to copy a formula that’s already super successful and just hope that you have a Marvel license and willingness to draw those superheroes as sexy as possible.
But Vampire Survivors is kind of a perfect Christmas game formula: you excitedly open gifts and hope it’s exactly what you want. And you know exactly what I mean. You’re thrilled if it’s the right weapon or armor. You’re so disappointed with an item that does not mesh with your playthrough at all. There’s nothing more Christmas than the joy and sorrow of opening gifts. It could be a Nintendo 64. It could be socks. Nobody knows and for some reason the box is the same size.
Big Trouble In Little Chimney pulls off the formula the best, so it’s the one that gets on the list. It goes hard, but it’s not hyper violent for the sake of novelty. It’s also clearly an independent game, but at least it doesn’t look like it was quickly put together overnight in a game programming bootcamp. It’s fun and silly and just this side of tongue-in-cheek to be fun without being too corny.
PowerWash Simulator
As kids, our parents forced us to spend days cleaning the house before Christmas. This was largely because Christmas was the only day that all my relatives came over to our house. Most holidays were at my grandma’s, but we took Christmas – probably because my Florida grandma was Jewish and didn’t have children living in her house.
Oh, man, we had to clean. Windows. The floor. You’d be on your knees outright scrubbing the metal track under a sliding door. We were little children doing full repairs and spackling holes in walls. You name it, we cleaned it. We power cleaned it. We washed it. We power washed it.
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Besides being comforting as a game in general, PowerWash Simulator has a Santa’s workshop level that reminds me of being seven years old and cutting the bushes using electric hedge trimmers that were almost as heavy as I was. There’s a sick, unhealthy joy in knowing, once all this junk is cleaned up, Christmas happens.
I’m sure it’s a bit crazy to be nostalgic for a deep clean due to the threat of judgemental aunts and uncles, but that was Christmas for me. Playing this game – and especially the seasonal stages – reminds of that simpler, more labor intensive time. Thinking back, I’m not sure my parents did a goddamn thing to clean.
The Sims
You can have Christmas in The Sims! You can get a Christmas tree! You can celebrate! You can invite friends over and give them gifts in hopes of making them want to kiss you. As the series has progressed, so have the amount of official and unofficial ways to design the perfect Christmas home in which the children aren’t crying this time.
It goes without saying that recreating my childhood house and childhood Christmas is ultimately a psychologically self-destructive act. But it’s the only way I literally can go home again. I can make it better. Grandma Lori and Grandpa Shelly are back in the land of the living and looking more bored than ever! Morbid thoughts aside, it is pretty cool throwing a Christmas party for my virtual friends. It’s pretty cool to get to go to any party at all, I bet.
Animal Crossing
Almost everything I wrote about The Sims applies to the GameCube version of Animal Crossing. Why the GameCube version? Because you can play actual Nintendo games on it. Theoretically, you could pretend that you’re receiving the greatest gifts that 1985 had to offer. The fact that it’s less convenient than any other emulated version doesn’t matter. You’re getting a video game as a gift and the game features Christmas iconography. Done.
Christmas NiGHTS into Dreams
That lowercase “i” in Christmas NiGHTS is going to kill me. Not important.
Christmas NiGHTS into Dreams was originally supposed to be a fun little demo for the main game on the Sega Saturn. Instead, it became a holiday tradition. Which makes sense because Christmas NiGHTS feels the closest I can possibly imagine to sugar plums dancing in my head. Of all the games on this list, Christmas NiGHTS does feel like it represents the purest magic of the holiday.
You may be playing the same basic game as NiGHTS but with more Christmas stuff strewn about with a whole bunch of Easter Eggs that can even change based on whether you’re playing the game near or on a holiday. It’s sweet, it’s charming, and it makes you wish more triple-A companies produced more Christmas games. Or at least it makes me wish for it. You probably wished for better graphics or something.
Fight of Gods
Aw, yeah, baby! Time to make Santa Claus fight Jesus Christ! Hell, Santa Claus is taking down all the gods in Fight of Gods.
What is Fight of Gods? I’m glad you asked, even if you won’t be after finding out! As you’ve probably guessed through the power of context, Fight of Gods is a fighting game in which you can play various religious figures. I was going to say ‘gods’ but Moses is in there and he really isn’t really a god. He does love hitting you with those stone tablet ten commandments, though!
Fight of Gods is not a good game. At all. It’s shovelware. It’s also a game I’ve put dozens of hours into and bought more than once. Everything in Fight of Gods is just so silly. So ridiculous. And what’s more ridiculous than a fighting game with Santa Claus? You can finally determine who the holiday is really about, even if Matt Stone and Trey Parker did it first decades ago.
Seriously, the Santa in this game is so stupid that it works. His hollow voiced, single-take ‘Merry Christmas’ makes me laugh so hard. That’s what Christmas is about, too. Reveling in the absurd and the nonsense. Allowing Saint Nicholas to beat up Anubis. Plus, Fight of Gods kind of captures that nostalgic feeling of you and your siblings slapping the crap out of each other. Merry Christmas, you nerds!
- Released
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September 16, 2002
- ESRB
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e
- Engine
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Havok
