12 Games of Christmas: The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause (GBA)
While perhaps not a modern Christmas classic like the film Elf, The Santa Clause is well known and follows a similarly optimistic take on the holiday, Scott Calvin forced to take on the role of Santa Claus and learning to appreciate life and family through the role. Less ambiguous on not being classic Christmas movies though are its sequels, the second involving Santa’s search for a wife and the third being a “you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone” tale. None of these movies were anything more than holiday comedies, but it seems someone at Buena Vista Games thought an action game could be made out of these almost action-free movies, and so, the Game Boy Advance ended up getting an adaptation of The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause.
For those who haven’t seen the movies, the plot is going to be somewhat hard to follow in the video game adaptation. It skims past the formative events that explain why Scott Calvin became Santa Claus making the events later in the game where he’s reduced back to his regular human life less impactful, and even the events of the third movie are poorly summarized in the cutscenes. The game begins with Santa pretending the North Pole is Canada for Bud and Sylvia, who are never introduced as his in-laws who are unaware of his role as Santa Claus. Jack Frost, the game’s antagonist, is just there at the start and treated rudely without the context that he was trying to replace Santa as the Christmas season’s mascot. If I hadn’t seen the movie the previous year many of the plot points would have seemed thrown in out of nowhere such as Lucy, the daughter of Scott’s ex-wife who is tossed into the game’s story with no explanation at all of how she’s related to him or why she is deemed so important. It’s a messy integration of only the biggest plot details of the movie that clearly wasn’t proofread by anyone who didn’t already know the way the story was meant to go, but they were probably banking on the fact that the same people who might buy this game or receive it as a gift are those with enough interest in the film to see it first… even though the game was released two days before the movie.
Putting aside the mismanaged plot, The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause is primarily a platforming game that is almost ridiculously straightforward in its design. Most levels can be completed as a simple dash from left to right, sometimes requiring the use of a jump that doesn’t go too high and drops fairly quickly. The jump issue isn’t too bad to start, as when you are playing as Santa Claus, he not only packs a double jump, but can open his coat to glide a little, giving you a few ways to brace yourself if you missed a leap. The fast falling can still lead to a few missed jumps, but when Jack Frost makes his move and strips Scott Calvin of his Santa magic, the glide is removed, your parachute option taken away as the levels begin to demand more precision in their jumps. There are a few areas where a precisely timed double jump from the right spot is necessary to land where you are aiming, and if you miss, you drop down a hole and have to restart the entire stage. Levels are pretty short and technically, if you only are heading for the exit, can be completed with hardly any resistance from the weak and predictable enemies or basic hazards like ice spikes. Even if you do get hit, you have a huge health bar, so forcing your way through can lead to a game wrapped up in less than an hour. However, there are cookies and milk hidden around levels in addition to snow globes as collectibles, these not really providing a good incentive for their collection but they do ask for a bit more action and level searching.
The collectibles certainly don’t undo the issues with level design though. Besides occasionally having to grab special presents like a toy tank that blows up ice barriers, the stages rely on awkwardly hopping to and fro until the exit usually quite abruptly shows up. The level format is changed up a few times, mainly by having levels where you need to outrun a slowly moving massive snowball that mostly just makes a level scroll automatically rather than posing a real threat. Sometimes you might be forced to fight, Santa packing a jack-in-the-box attack that the game quite annoyingly asks you to use on enemies who fill the entire platform they’re standing on, making for an awkward jump battle. When depowered to regular Scott Calvin he has a long range snowball attack instead, but even the hardest fight with Jack Frost himself is mostly just attacking, then double jumping over him so he leaves himself open as he continues to attack where you were and then repeating the process after he turns around.
The more annoying aspect of the game though is the incredibly high amount of ice. While some of it has a gameplay excuse like a section of the level where you slide down a ramp of ice and need to jump off at the right time to avoid damage, most of it just makes the slightly awkward platforming even worse. Yes, the game takes place primarily at The North Pole and during the snowy Christmas season, but it seems every bit of ground the game can justify covering in ice is coated in it, making some instances where you need to hop from small platform to small platform more frustrating than they should be. Slipping off the edge and having to do your fast-falling leaps to get back on it over and over as you try to avoid slipping makes the cookie and milk collecting sidequest a chore on top of a bore, and those jumps mentioned earlier that want good placement or will lead to doom aren’t helped by the need to tangle with your poor traction. Even interior platforms for areas like the toy workshop are iced over, turning what could have been bland level design into outright bad design.
Most chapters end with a few minigames that break away from the regular mode of play, although the final chapter chooses to skip them so you have to go to the menu to play their versions of the minigame. The first style involves elves working in a haywire workshop to create a jet powered scooter board, these more like puzzle platform stages than the game’s typical action platformer angle. The elves, however, only have a singular jump, and with hazards placed to be the exact distance they can jump horizontally in length, it’s quite easy to die and have to restart them, although they are optional to make up for their own twist on the poor jumping mechanics. Finding the parts involves overcoming conveyor belts and enemies you can’t hurt, the elves needing to rely on the specific tool each one was given. Switching between them allows them to do things like screw in bolts and hammer switches to create new platforms or raise and lower doors, and while the puzzles aren’t too complex, they’d be serviceable if the elves could jump a bit better. Switching between them is a touch slow, but the management of them as there are more and more with each puzzle becomes moderately involved and could have been the highlight of the experience.
The other minigame on offer is one involving Santa delivering presents to nice children and coal to naughty ones, and while the haywire workshop minigame makes sense during most of the game, the fact Santa is still delivering presents after he’s been stripped of his powers makes the placement of this one a bit odd. After all, when Jack Frost becomes the new Santa he explicitly refuses to deliver and insists kids come to him for gifts, something even this game manages to convey well enough despite its poor storytelling. The delivery minigame comes out the cleanest of everything in the game though; Santa is flying through the night sky and tossing down either presents or coal depending on the symbols above the houses he passes over. Deliver the right items to the right places without running out of time and you earn a decent score, the only thing that can potentially mess up your completion of this easy task being the cold gusts of air that will slow you down if you fly into them. While not too interesting, this is more in line with the kind of stuff a kid’s game can have without being too bothersome or bereft of any value as you do at least have to fly moderately well and deliver the right items while doing so. It’s perhaps the only thing in The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause that feels like it was properly executed, the simple minigame break appreciated in a game that otherwise stumbles through what should have been a basic and easily executed play style.
THE VERDICT: While almost any license can be adapted into a serviceable platform game, The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause completely messes up even that simple adaptation. The quick dropping after a jump mixes horribly with the abundance of iced over platforms, making the otherwise far too straightforward levels only have challenge when you’re slip-sliding about and dropping down pits. The minigames aren’t as bad with the elf workshop requiring a bit of thinking and the delivery game being too simple to feel strongly about, but the tiny diversions don’t help with a basic yet incredibly sloppy platformer that can’t even tell the plot of an easily summarized movie properly.
And so, I give The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause for Game Boy Advance…
A TERRIBLE rating. The overall blandness of the experience helps The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause not be as bad as the game based on fellow modern Christmas movie Elf. Rather than being offensive around every turn, this game can be blitzed through quickly if you don’t go for cookies and milk despite the flaws in its jumping mechanics and dull level design, and if you do search for the collectibles, you scrape up against a few more legitimate challenges, albeit ones that don’t really provide anything too interesting still. Almost everything is done a little wrong, from the bad jumping during the elf sections, the terrible telling of the movie’s story, the ice found everywhere in the regular levels, and the hollowness of actually going for the collectibles, but the delivery game is tolerable and parts of the game are spent with things too simple to be bothersome like the levels where you outrun the giant snowball. Rather than making the game as a whole better though, those moments of respite instead just help it dodge being classified as completely boring and frustrating.
Why this movie was deemed as a good pick for a game will likely forever remain a mystery, as the game seems to have very few ideas of what to do with its premise. Besides the midgame shift to being powerless Scott Calvin instead of Santa Claus, this game could be repackaged as a generic Santa Claus platformer that still didn’t really have any interesting ideas, most of it just following a generic platformer template licensed movies used back on systems like the SNES and Genesis. While those could sometimes twist interesting concepts out of their source material though, The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause almost seems to avoid its inspiration at times, for nowhere in the film did it ever imply that Santa could glide with his coat. While it was a very odd choice of a movie to be adapting, there was definitely plenty of room to make that adaptation better than the one we got, especially since this game couldn’t even get some of its fundamentals down well enough to be a passable game to play on Christmas.