12 Games of Christmas: Disney’s A Christmas Carol (DS)

A Christmas Carol has been adapted to film so many times before that you pretty much need some twist or claim to fame for a new one to make a splash. Whether it be a modern comedic retelling like Scrooged or an animated take  starring recognizable cartoon characters like Mickey’s Christmas Carol, to be more than a name on a theater marquee at Christmas time, it’s practically required you get creative with the source material. Oddly enough though, Disney decided in 2009 they’d go for a new animated take on the story of Scrooge’s life-changing Christmas Eve visits, and for the most part, all it brought was Jim Carrey in a role where he couldn’t flex his comedic chops and a computer animated style preoccupied with things like making a scene of him outrunning the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come an action scene worth seeing with 3D glasses. It still had the same heartwarming tale of a miserly old man learning to be generous and kind, but if not for the weird DS tie-in game produced to coincide with the film, I would not have remembered this forgettable adaptation at all this Christmas season.

Perhaps the first oddity in Disney’s A Christmas Carol for DS, outside of the choice to adapt the film, is that it almost completely ignores the computer animated look of the film when it comes to its own in-game graphics. Scrooge and the rest of the cast are certainly styled in a manner similar to the film, the look of the Ghost of Christmas Past and Jacob Marley showing that this isn’t some disparate A Christmas Carol game hastily made into a tie-in, but the art itself uses traditional animation that is colorful but looks more like a made-for-TV cartoon special than something Disney would produce. Besides the cheap looking movement of them though the art doesn’t look bad and is even consistent in quality between cutscenes and interactive moments, about half of the game being akin to a point and click adventure.

At various points over the course of Scrooge’s redemption story, you’ll be asked to interact with a scene on the touch screen. These are usually a room with a few objects of interest you need to activate in the right order or with the right timing, some examples consisting of needing to distract Strooge so his employee Bob Cratchit can sneak a coal to keep himself warm while working late, a straightforward snowman building event where you just need to find what you need to tap in the first place to build it, and a scene where Scrooge has been inexplicably shrunk and needs to make his way onto a table using stuff found on the floor. Besides getting the right order of operations and acting during specific windows of time like when Scrooge is distracted, there isn’t really much to these, no clever problem solving or puzzling interactions to worry about. They’re limited in design and scope, self-contained and following easy logic, so they won’t hold up a child playing even if an adult might find them too simple to be entertained by. There are some that are least funny in concept, the game asking at one point for the player to make Scrooge as miserable as possible on his walk home by activating hazards and passersby to bug him. If these are viewed mostly as a means of interactivity to carry a player through the plot though they aren’t really doing anything wrong, but that leaves the minigame half of the game as the backbone, and these are much more hit and miss.

Sometimes cropping up during the point and click segments and others just appearing on their own, the minigames of Disney’s A Christmas Carol rarely swing for creative designs. While it is simple in concept, a coin-throwing game where the coin flies towards three dishes based on how quickly you slide your stylus across the screen is one of the more interesting minigames, it at least having the ability to score differently based on where you throw the coin and having to figure out how strong the throw needs to be. It’s a decent way to fill time during a minigame section despite not being all that entertaining, but other games like the slide puzzles are just filler that drags down a game that didn’t really have anything strong going for it before. Most of the minigames that aren’t bad are often too easy or plain like a snowball fight you don’t really have a chance of losing and a cooking game where you can only do it by the book with little room to fail. They’re definitely better than when the game trots out generic card and memory games, these swinging from either staying too simple to make the diversion entertaining or tipping wildly based on the computer opponent’s whims, such games as a twist on Slapjack not dependent on your actions so much as whether or not the AI decides to immediately smack or not. The game even features an adaptation of the unnecessary chase sequence from the film but makes it worse, the movie’s version at least quick and action-packed compared to the drawn out affair in the game where you spend a few slow minutes knocking over barrels to impede the hearse as Scrooge scrambles forward unopposed.

The minigames hedging towards common designs and the point and click often being just about finding what to click rather than how to solve a puzzle give the impression that Disney’s A Christmas Carol is more a game about padding your play time with enough activities that it can cover the expected story beats without feeling rushed. Admittedly, some game likes the violin and piano playing games had potential, but they repeat the same musical loops and are too simple on the player’s part to pose a challenge once they understand what’s required of them. Most stuff found during the story ranges from mediocre to bad to busy work such as playing a scratch card or wiping your screen to reveal what’s been covered in snow. There are hidden objects in every point and click scene, these mostly playing into decorating a Christmas scene near the end save for the ghosts who are essentially collectibles you must encircle. Rating systems try to make the games more interesting but the gold medal is often a pretty low bar, but there is one odd area where Disney’s A Christmas Carol puts in a decent degree of effort and it pays off a bit. The game features an Advent calendar with 24 different spot-the-difference images, these being detailed and actually quite lovely pieces of art based on the movie’s art style instead of the game’s. These are about as good as this type of puzzle can get, the need to circle a set amount of differences between two pictures that are almost exactly the same an idle amusement at most, but the detailed images pack some changes that will be quickly noticed, ones that require a bit more searching, and some truly difficult ones. You can circle freely without penalty, but the circles are very picky about registering as a difference properly identified to prevent this method of brute forcing. Sadly, the DS screen’s size means the image resolution suffers some, making some of these harder than they should be, but for what they are, they’re effective, something that can’t be said for all the minigames and point and click scenes on offer.

THE VERDICT: An odd video game adaptation of a fairly forgettable movie, Disney’s A Christmas Carol seems to know the odds are stacked against it and doesn’t put in too much of an effort to be interesting. It has some nice touches like the well designed spot-the-difference puzzles of its Advent calendar and it includes the original text of A Christmas Carol, but most of its moments of interactivity feel like little chores to complete to move the familiar story along. Many of the point and click moments are functional and just about finding what you need to tap, making them more tolerable than the minigames that are often simple, drag on, or have little to offer. Minigame designs with potential never ask enough from the player to be too interesting, meaning that the game on the whole is left with mostly bland or boring games that weigh down the mediocre point and click half.

And so, I give Disney’s A Christmas Carol for DS…

A BAD rating. The areas the game does right like the spot-the-difference puzzles and the starts of interesting instrument minigames can’t really compare to games that put much more effort into the designs, and as only small parts of a game with very little creativity, they had no chance of redeeming this particular adaptation of Scrooge’s story. There is a range of activities that technically prevent it from completely stagnating, but they mostly range from acceptable time wasters to game styles with no real appeal. Slide puzzles are pretty much go-to filler in many games and unsurprisingly crop up here, and even the point and click segments don’t really have enough going on in them to feel like you’re solving a scene. It’s just a matter of identifying what has to be tapped with the stylus and identifying the one or two items that need to be activated first or within a specific time window. A playthrough of the game takes just a bit longer than watching the movie itself, and it really does feel like basic moments of interactivity were thrown in between story beats so that it qualifies as a video game. None of them are really offensive or hard to play, the worst moments being things like the game arbitrarily picking if it’s good at cards or not, but so many of them commit the sin of being boring busywork, the passable ones too short to elevate the experience.

In the same way A Christmas Carol needs some twist to be interesting in film form in the modern age, the game’s retelling of the tale needed something to make it more than a one-note licensed game riding on the Christmas season and a movie. Developer Sumo Digital has put out plenty of good titles, but it’s clear the prospect of this odd game adaptation didn’t excite them, putting in the work to fill the title with plenty to do with the stylus and touch screen but not anything that will really excite or stoke the mind. It’s not abysmal, but the unoriginal and bland designs of most of its minigames and puzzles are enough to make all but the youngest of players say bah humbug.