12 Games of Christmas: Santa’s Workshop (PC)
The box-pushing puzzle is quite common in video games, from a side activity in a more action focused game to the whole point of certain titles like Sokoban and its English version Boxxle. Santa’s Workshop is essentially just like Sokoban in that all it really provides are a bunch of levels for the box-pushing gameplay, but it does at least have the Christmas coat of paint to it and a somewhat appropriate one at that. After all, in this game you’re pushing around presents to get them wrapped up and sent out to the good girls and boys of the world, but besides the seasonal accoutrements, Santa’s Workshop might as well just be a level pack for the original box-pushing game.
The game plays the same way Sokoban did back in the 1980s. You are presented with a play field made up of squares where movement is allowed. Represented by a snowflake on the board, you can move it up, down, left, or right into any free square you can find, although if you want to get somewhere quickly you can click the open tile instead to have the snowflake take whatever route to it it can find provided it is possible for it to reach that spot. The only other objects in the play field are a set of Christmas gifts, the appearance of which are randomized every time a level starts. The snowflake can nudge the teddy bears, knitted hats, toy cars, and bouncy balls a square over at a time but it is unable to pull them, meaning that if a toy ends up in a corner, it’s completely stuck and the level is lost. Moving around the toys requires making sure none of them ever get stuck in an area where you can’t move them, the goal of a stage being to have every present on one of the green spaces. The number of presents and green spaces increases as things get more difficult, but no present ever has an assigned green space, meaning you’ll have to figure out which present goes where.
Santa’s Workshop has both the ups and downs of this unchanged play style. It’s a decent puzzle concept where you need to manage the placement of a few different objects carefully to succeed, the later stages really requiring a huge degree of forward thinking to ensure you’re moving pieces in a way that will allow a multi-step solution to flourish. However, locking the snowflake to the play area means that movement can become extremely tedious. The layouts of the levels almost never have a single tile more than what they deem necessary, and while easier levels may have a little extra wiggle room or movement space, these are quickly trimmed in Santa’s Workshop as the difficulty escalates incredibly quickly even in the so-called beginner levels. Across the 128 levels split into four difficulty rankings you’ll find a lot of micromanaging of movement necessary, the snowflake sometimes having to worm it’s way across the entire level to bump a present once then work its way around it again to bump that same present a little bit more. The process of completing the more complex puzzles can be tedious even though conceptually they do challenge the mind quite well, but the lack of any additional mechanics after you learn the basics of play does mean that its gameplay never really evolves, it just keeps getting longer and harder with no shakeups to prevent play stagnation.
There are two tools the game grants you to help a bit. If you make a wrong move in Santa’s Workshop you are not doomed. The Undo button is incredibly generous and completely free, the player able to undo any movement they’ve taken, even able to go back hundreds of moves if need be. A full restart might be preferred at times and those are free as well, so at least this game that is heavily prone to errors screwing over a solution offers the means to reverse the actions without trouble. A more conditional tool though is the Tea Break option. If a puzzle just seems too hard or you’ve been stuck on it for ages, you can always click the Tea Break button for it to autocomplete, the game showing you the solution as it finishes the level for you. While it is nice to have this skip button for those who want it, something more like a hint system would perhaps be better because it is impossible to retry levels in Santa’s Workshop unless you wipe your save file completely. In fact, not only can you not retry levels, but if you beat them all, your save file can’t even do anything anymore. There is no way to select specific puzzles if you want to do them out of order save for choosing between the four difficulties represented by an elf, snowman, Santa, and a present. The inability to retry levels is the only real flaw Santa’s Workshop introduces to its gameplay style, any other faults being endemic to the box-pushing genre, but it also brought in its undo and Tea Break options to balance out that misstep, putting it back on about the expected level fans of this gameplay style would hope to find.
The Christmas theme for the game doesn’t offer too much, its influence pretty much surface level since the gameplay mechanics are unchanged from its inspirations. In fact, the Christmas coat of paint and its deliberately cute art style may make kids want to play it until they find the puzzles far too difficult and the process of solving them too slow for their tastes, the very methodical lengths you have to go to not really the best for people with low attention spans. The Christmasy music that plays is at least a little relaxing until you realize it doesn’t really have much music meaning it can quickly grow stale, but you can disable the music while in a level to work around this repetition at least. Having the presents get wrapped when they are on the green destination tiles does at least work as a decent excuse for why toys need to be in a certain place, but it’s pretty easy to forget you’re playing a Christmas game when most of what you’re viewing is an icy grid where a snowflake bumps objects around to a song you’ll likely turn off, although I guess hearing the same song over and over is an appropriate element of the real life Christmas experience they captured accurately.
THE VERDICT: To fault Santa’s Workshop for its straightforward set of 128 box-pushing puzzles would be like calling a book full of Sudoku puzzles bad. Santa’s Workshop provides a large selection of its style of play that properly engages the block-pushing formula even if it never evolves beyond the basic mechanics of its genre, the game essentially Sokoban wrapped up in Christmas imagery. The layouts are legitimately challenging, sometimes incredibly so, and while definitely tedious to complete at times, the undo and Tea Break features keep it manageable. The unfortunate choice to require a save file wipe to replay levels definitely undoes some of the good will those quality of life features provide though. Santa’s Workshop is only as good as its generic execution of the box-pushing gameplay ultimately, and in that regard, it’s acceptable but not very exciting.
And so, I give Santa’s Workshop for PC…
An OKAY rating. If the puzzle type on feature is one a player enjoys, they’ll find a decent batch of levels to play, one they can return to like a book full of Sudoku puzzles whenever they want to scratch the block-pushing itch. However, there is nothing going on in the game beyond just providing more of this decades old gameplay format, and while being derivative doesn’t make a game worse, it does leave Santa’s Workshop with nothing unique to serve players who aren’t interested in Sokoban. The Christmas art is cute and the seasonal music is calming until it grows old, but Santa’s Workshop isn’t really a Christmas game so much as it is game with Christmas trappings. It’s decorated in seasonal attire to hopefully slip past the stigmas against Sokoban’s often dry looking gameplay. While some may enjoy the box-pushing puzzles more than others, on its own merits, it can truly test a player’s brain, but it also doesn’t make the puzzle solving process all that great. Tedious movement and a flat set of rules that never evolves can lead to the game wearing out its welcome if the concept fails to get its hooks in you, but the puzzles aren’t really bad in isolation, the player needing to come into them in a good mindset and perhaps not try to blitz them all or they risk repeated need for the undo button and find themselves tempted too often by the autocomplete option.
Santa’s Workshop really needed some element to make it stand out from the plethora of Sokoban imitators and all it went for was attaching itself to a holiday. Even just one new element to the formula could have made it stand out, but all it does is present a collection of regular box-pushing puzzles and banks on the idea that this classic gameplay style can carry the experience alone. Besides the inability to reasonably replay levels it doesn’t mess that idea up, but it does end up being an experience that’s only really catered towards people who like its puzzle style already and even then it won’t wow them with its unambitious but acceptable level layouts.