12 Games of Christmas: Who’s Your Santa!? (PC)
Christmas is a holiday about peace on Earth and good will toward men, but comedy will latch onto whatever it can, and the concept of the typically nice Santa going naughty has cropped up in many forms throughout the years. Who’s Your Santa!? is a raunchy take on the bad Santa idea and revels in it, boasting about its inappropriate content and hoping to shock the player with just how ridiculous it gets with its adult humor.
However, Who’s Your Santa!?’s story isn’t really presented all that well as the game gets lost in its joke-telling and visuals. You seem to not be Santa but instead a character called by a few different names, Fakus (as in Fake-us) and a more explicit variation of the name being the most common forms of it. The real Santa is a character in the game and the central Santa imposter’s goal seems to be to get ahead of the holiday icon’s Christmas Eve deliveries and set up a way to humiliate him. Fakus’s fishnet stockings, high heels, and tight underpants all go for a deliberately absurd look, and the character himself indulges in the more typical actions the bad Santa archetype uses to contrast with the warm and jolly Santa Claus. Fakus drinks heavily, enjoys erotic activities, and is quick to crack an offensive joke, and since this game is pretty much marketing itself to draw in the crowd who will enjoy that type of humor, it does deliver in that regard. Admittedly, it’s not all too creative, perhaps hoping being so brazen and crass will work on its own instead of there being any effort to be clever with its referential and raunchy humor.
The game takes you to a house in Japan, the United States, and Russia in your attempts to outdo the real Santa, and each location features pretty much the type of jokes you’d expect. Russia has a bear, America has guns, Japan has inappropriate tentacle monsters, and the humor surrounding these aspects isn’t much more than Fakus commenting some more surface level humor in a heavily accented voice that oddly enough does have its charm. It’s less that the jokes are sometimes dark or deliberately offensive that makes them fail and more that very few are particularly imaginative. Some like having a portrait of Putin serve as a not so subtle form of state surveillance in Russia are a bit more creative in how they portray a cliche, and there are things like the Game Over screens where they have to tell a joke wordlessly that seem to force them into making more fun and absurd visuals to sell it. The game isn’t claiming to be witty though, but since the humor of the game is the main draw, it feels like it needed to pack more of a unique punch to carry an experience that is pretty weak in the gameplay department.
There are two types of alternating play in Who’s Your Santa!?, with each cropping up once per country. New locations begin with a sleigh race against the real Santa, although it’s not so much about speed as it is making it safely to an end point where you need to make sure to grab the area-appropriate floating item. While you are given a generous amount of health to survive the many hazards that block your path through the night sky, your sleigh is also very large. Hanging back to the left as you fly right still means you fill about a third of the vertical and horizontal space on screen, meaning when an object appears you don’t have too long to react in a sleigh that isn’t too easy to maneuver. Hazard spacing mostly accounts for this, but it is possible to be guided into one spot only to find you won’t have much time to avoid a large incoming obstacle. These include simple little twisters and thunderclouds in the air to keep you moving while the ground is more often populated with regionally appropriate obstacles, America’s McDonald’s restaurants and Japan’s torii Shinto gates meaning that not staying too close to the ground is crucial but flying high can leave you set up to smack into a quickly appearing aerial hazard. Persistence usually wins out, but it’s not particularly enjoyable since it’s less about skillful dodging and more about the random obstacle placement turning out well.
After you’ve made it to a house though, you have a bit of time before Santa arrives. The game is now more of a point and click adventure, Fakus needing to rig the house in a way that will mess with Santa’s attempt to do his Christmas duty and leave him ripe for humiliation. While you might get some clues about how Fakus intends to do this, many of the houses have some aspect that isn’t easy to figure out. Placing objects or activating something to set off a sequence of events is key, but what can be interacted with and how isn’t communicated all that well. The houses all have similar layouts but regional themes and items, but with so many objects it can be hard to realize that a plain looking doormat is key to a puzzle instead of just set dressing, and the game expecting you to figure out where to place certain items hinders these areas that are otherwise decent enough for experimentation. The more annoying aspect of them though is that you really have no clue what Santa will do when he shows up. His reactions can send him scrambling upstairs or send him into certain rooms that you won’t really know he’ll head into, so repeating the level to see his reactions is necessary. The game will indicate when you have placed everything required at least, but it also has a timer that just makes the process more tedious. The guesswork involved and poor communication of item use feels like the biggest issue with Who’s Your Santa!?, because whereas the humor is certainly subjective and perhaps fresher to certain people and the flying segments are flawed but doable, the house puzzles involve a lot of bumbling about with poor guidance. That isn’t to say some point and click moments aren’t decent. The need to sneak into the bedrooms of sleeping people to grab items feels like a decent idea, and the order of operations for certain tasks does make sense, with a few “eureka” moments when you realize where an item can go, but the only complex thinking is trying to do the occasional leaps in logic the game requires to humiliate Santa.
Who’s Your Santa!? is also The Game Hoard’s first covered game to include achievement spam, a feature that might actually be the reason this title was removed from Steam a little over a month before the publication of this review. Presents are scattered all around the game, and almost every time you grab one of these overly abundant items, a Steam achievement is earned, the game featuring 222 achievements that are mostly tied to this incredibly easy task. Oddly enough it does feature legitimate challenges within these achievements as well, either for playing flying sections well, finding unique interactions in the houses, or triggering certain objects, but their value is lost amidst the sea of freebies meant to pad a steam profile. It’s a cheap tactic meant to draw in sales but one that ultimately doesn’t impact the game meaningfully despite seeing constant achievement pop-ups during play.
THE VERDICT: The over the top raunchiness and deliberately offensive humor of Who’s Your Santa!? isn’t the game’s main issue. In fact, for players who can look past the lack of creativity in the humor, it might be what helps them ignore the poor game design. The sleigh races don’t offer much outside of random moments of hard to avoid damage, but it’s the houses and their point and click play that drags the game down. Unclear objectives, odd item interactions, and the need to repeat the level to even learn how the target of your traps will behave means that Who’s Your Santa!? is a poor game hiding behind a ridiculous mask to try and make players forgive it.
And so, I give Who’s Your Santa!? for PC…
A BAD rating. For a game that can’t even keep its punctuation straight between its name and cover image, Who’s Your Santa!? is both as bad as it seems but not downright terrible. Since so much of its design is devoted to its visuals and jokes, you don’t get to hit the bad snags as often as you’d expect, but when you are expected to intuit a doormat’s importance or how those beads can play into a puzzle you’ll only know exists through repeated failure, then Who’s Your Santa!? becomes less about if you’re laughing at its over the top presentation and more about trying to figure out what will work in the game’s warped logic. The sleigh flying sections range from acceptably plain to potentially annoying, and the jokes there are far less prevalent, meaning you don’t even have that crutch to lean on during those segments. While the problems are easily identified, Who’s Your Santa!? is also incredibly short and doesn’t give too much time to dwell on things outside of the small hitches as you try to suss out what’s missing in the point and click segments. It is somewhat interesting to see what the game will do next even if it often goes for the most expected route with its irreverent humor, but since so much of the game’s runtime is focused on those run of the mill offensive jokes instead of its flawed gameplay, it skirts around being far worse.
As a game Who’s Your Santa!? is definitely flawed, but its video game form is more about delivering the sort of bad Santa humor that isn’t all that uncommon. Some people want to celebrate their holidays by corrupting it into something ridiculous and raunchy, and that’s who this Santa is catered towards. The right amount of style can overcome poor game design, but even for those looking for the silliness this game promises, it’s not quite the uproarious experience it wants to be. Rough around the edges and unimaginitive, Who’s Your Santa!? doesn’t even do its adult humor well enough to make it a good fit for an irreverent Christmas.