The (Un)Official Father Christmas Game - 2016 Going Back Home

Post date: 02-Jan-2017 17:18:29

Game by: IvanBasic

Reviewed by: Simon Ferré

We seem to have one of the longest titled game of the entire competition for review here. The thing that is strange about this is that when the game starts loading the name that appears on the screen seems to suggest it's a rather late entry into last year (2015)'s keywords challenge, in which the name of the game has to be made up of keywords to enable the title to be more than 10 characters in length (so in this case it says NOT STEP OVER BORDER) with no mention of Santa. It's almost as if the author has picked up this game from their unfinished games pile to make into something for this competition. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose.

Anyway, swiftly on to the game Title Screen (there's no loading screen):

Quite straightforward so far. Apart from the key controls. The keys are left for the user to figure out. I thought the Instructions might help in this regard, so I chose that option:

Still no help with regard to pressing keys, but thankfully it wasn't too difficult to break into the program and list it to find out this information. I'll not let you know what the keys are - it'll give you something to do when you try it yourself.

Now on to the game itself. It has some very interesting skill involved. I particularly like the neat touch with regard to the footsteps that Santa leaves on the path. We have to imagine him in all his glory as he isn't drawn at all on the screen, which I quite like as it keeps the game speed at an acceptable level. Here's a game in progress:

I find that Santa only moves so far to the left or right with each step, and the problem is that he very soon wanders onto the purple area, which makes the pathway more ragged. Only by getting back on the white part of the path will the path get back to being smooth again. There doesn't seem to be any end in sight, either, so I don't know how far this path goes. The idea is a good one, and even though the animation is only character square by character square, it is pretty effective.

It's so easy to end up on the blue area and when that happens, it's game over. It's hard to say what my final score was, if any at all, as the game doesn't seem to have any obvious scoring going on - all I saw was an occasional number going up the left side of the screen, but I had no idea what that represented. It could have been steps taken, drinks drunk before walking, calories burned, distance left to go, or any number of things.

All in all, this is a quite simple but slightly addictive game. I played it a couple of times before I remembered I was supposed to be taking screenshots and writing the review.

Score 12 steps out of a billion presents delivered.