Puppet Combo’s eye for the absurd in PS1 era horror and old-school low-budget slashers alike has been key to the popularity of their games, and Christmas Massacre joins that growing list thanks to a giddily gory take on the arcade score attack game.
The prologue sees a young boy, adorned only his underwear, a Santa mask, and hat, sneaking out of his room at an orphanage run by Nuns. A voice tells him there’s a knife in the kitchen, and from there it’s up to you. The environment is typically cold and unfeeling until you make your way downstairs to the main hall, and hear a deranged version of Silent Night playing while other children dance bizarrely as a Nun watches on like some holy sentry.
Christmas Massacre is first and foremost a stealth game, and it’s during this dreary, odd party that you really start to learn the systems. In either first-person or third-person, Larry can crouch to make less noise when moving, and can use the shadows to avoid the gaze of the Nun and children. Getting caught by the Nun here means an instant restart, but the section is relatively brief, so it’s not too aggravating.
Once Larry successfully sneaks past and into the kitchen to pick up that knife though, you just know it won’t end until he’s murdered every poor soul, and in this stage at least your prey has nowhere to go, so there’s a flexibility to exactly how you want to hunt them all down in suitably grisly fashion.
After the opening credits roll, we flash forward to an adult Larry, dressed as a grim-looking Santa, and wallowing in his festive cesspool of a house, where his Christmas tree tells him to go on a fresh killing spree. Larry naturally obliges, and heads off to take on level after level of slasherific score challenges in people’s homes just before Christmas. Just like Old Saint Nick, Larry has something to deliver to every home in this neighborhood.
Now, if Larry is spotted, his potential victims will panic and head for the nearest exit, which is usually just a matter of seconds away so rushing headlong into a murder spree is a last-ditch option, and largely not a successful one either. Instead, it’s all about timing kills to hide bodies from others, switching off lights to ensure you remain unseen, and peeking around doorways to prevent Larry from stumbling into the lap of a victim, thus alerting the whole place to his presence.
The quicker Larry offs the household and remains relatively unseen, the better his score will be, but the initial attempts are best utilized as a way to scout out the victim’s walking patterns, doors to avoid, and the optimal shadowy spots to lurk in. It has the air of a festive, fast-paced Manhunt to it, except you’re actually playing an unhinged serial killer who has no reluctance to murder everyone who dares awkwardly dance around in his vicinity.
I was initially unsure if the focus on scoring each killfest with minimal context (although there is some story), and having near-instant fails for a single mistake was going to hurt the very ethos of what makes a Puppet Combo game work, but happily, even with this more streamlined approach there’s no denying it still absolutely captures the right atmosphere, and there’s something wickedly delicious about the idea of a serial killer going on a murder spree just to rack up a high score.
Let’s be honest, there simply aren’t enough Christmas horror games out there. This solves that, evoking the holiday spirit of Silent Night, Deadly Night to create a manic, mean-spirited slasher game that doesn’t linger like a badly-cooked Christmas dinner.
Christmas Massacre review code for PC provided by the publisher.
Christmas Massacre is out now on Steam.