The Night Christmas Ended (PC)
‘Twas the night before Christmas and we might just be screwed because a goblin shot Santa while hunting for food. Luckily, this Giant Goblin (he’s an inch taller than most) isn’t interested in making a Santa Claus roast. Ready to leave Santa out in the cold, he changes his tune when St. Nick offers gold. More than just hunting accidents threaten Christmas this night, the goblin having many strange foes he must fight. With a curse on his lips that leaves even the narrator offended, the Giant Goblin takes off to make sure this isn’t The Night Christmas Ended.
The Night Christmas Ended is a comedic Christmas shooter where the game’s attitude feels almost as important as the actual shooting gameplay. When Santa Claus’s bag of gifts and the naughty and nice list are pilfered by the evil candy factory owner Valdeze the holiday already found itself in jeopardy, but the self-proclaimed Giant Goblin is more than ready to hunt down the evil floating cycloptic head once the payday is guaranteed. Peppered throughout your quick quest to reach Valdeze are plenty of unsubtitled moments where characters crack jokes, the game rife with innuendo and irreverent humor. When The Night Christmas Ended is just indulging in some juvenile potty humor or being deliberately absurd it can be somewhat amusing and even hit on a few funny ideas like the voice actress for Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer jamming half-hearted animal noises into random parts of the dialogue, and overall the lowbrow humor feels like it gives the game its personality. However, at other points it can feel like The Night Christmas Ended thinks it is more offensive than it is, often stepping aside after saying something to point at how politically incorrect the statement was even though it was fairly tame. The relatively reserved approach to trying to be edgy does mean few will probably walk away legitimately bothered by it, but having the game slow down its scenes by acknowledging its imagined scandalous nature doesn’t feel like it contributes much. The sophomoric tone has its charms, but it’s the type of humor where lingering long on an idea starts to make it drag.
Funnily enough though, the same Giant Goblin who has some rather raunchy insults and innuendos for his enemies is actually quite supportive to the player. During the shooting gameplay the goblin will routinely make comments on how well you’re doing, but outside of moments where you take a ton of damage quickly or die he will mostly be fairly friendly and lavish you with a good deal of praise for your performance even if you’re not doing anything too special. Admittedly there may be an ulterior motive here, the game quick to suggest you make a Youtube Let’s Play to show off your skills which is likely a way to get the game’s name out there, but being the one person on this goblin’s good side does make him a bit more endearing since he is pretty prickly to everyone else he encounters. One thing that may impede any attempts to set up a Let’s Play though is an odd flickering glitch I encountered that would have made the game almost unplayable, the screen constantly cutting to black briefly with the fix, oddly enough, being to enable the FPS counter option in the menu. Thankfully the technical text in the bottom left didn’t obscure any of the action and even showed how smooth the game does run when it’s not flickering constantly.
In The Night Christmas Ended, you and possibly another player are going to spend most of your time blasting “candy ghosts” while backed by rock covers of Christmas tunes. These candy ghosts mostly manifest as weird versions of bats and hopping rainbow mounds but a few things like the candy piece that splits open to reveal a monstrous eye do match this unusual concept for opposition a bit better. The Giant Goblin stands on a stretch of ground boxed in by large peppermint borders, able to move left and right and fire in three directions: upwards, diagonally left, and diagonally right. You are given two guns you can swap between, one utilizing a machine gun fire that will overheat if used too rapidly and the other firing a charge shot that is slower to fire but stronger for it. In the standard stages you’ll mostly just be running back and forth to dodge the small selection of enemies while managing your weapons as best you can to blast them all away, but there’s more to the shooting than trying to line up your shots, and since many monsters are fairly quick it would likely be hard to have the pinpoint accuracy needed to actually hit them all square on. Your bullets are actually able to ricochet off that peppermint barrier, giving you the ability to hit foes who are further away or to pepper the battlefield if you start to get outnumbered. Some enemies like the jelly blocks will even require bouncing your bullets to hit their weak spots, so while initially only having three angles to shoot at does feel limiting, over time you’ll come to appreciate the opportunities afforded to you by aiming not for the enemies but for the right part of the border needed to hit your targets.
The Night Christmas Ended is a short adventure overall though and it doesn’t get too ambitious with the opposition, but there is enough pressure put on you to let this shooting system find some footing. A few boss battles offer a bit more of a drastic change in how you approach battles too, most of your foes not particularly durable so it’s often about managing their number rather than having to make sure you aren’t crowded out by a few massive foes or high numbers of enemy bullets. The bosses aren’t too difficult though, even an outright invisible one not too hard to bumble into beating just with rapid fire if you don’t want to use the clues to find him, but there are three difficulty options as represented by a medal system. If you can beat a level on silver though you will usually likely handle it just as well on gold save a stage or two like one where you need to stand in a certain spot to prime a bomb when mobility is often your best survival tool. A few power-ups or even power downs can spice things up a bit, a spread shot or growing bullets having some fairly obvious advantages but turning into an even larger goblin is meant to make you a bigger target.
The more impressive variation comes from The Night Christmas Ended breaking away from its standard shooting format at parts. While the normal combat can sometimes be a bit more creative like a competition against other goblins and a gnome where you can only hurt them by ricocheting shots properly before they do the same, it’s when you find yourself riding atop Rudolph or teleporting between sides of what must be molten candy that the action really undergoes some meaningful shifts. The Rudolph levels give you freedom of movement through the air in a top down perspective as well front and back shots, but ricochets are dependent on hitting large angelic eyes correctly and they still have some value because of how cramped the aerial battles get. The teleporting gimmick in the molten candy stages isn’t quite as clean though, the goblin having two vertical stretches he can walk up and down across in the few levels that focus on it and needing to use portals to hop to either side of the battlefield. The problem with the portal idea is more the enemies feel like a weak fit for it, much of what you’ll fight being bats who try to fly towards you but are easily tricked by just popping back and forth between sides. Still, quickly changing format and adding ideas like the battles against other goblin gunners feels like the kind of shake-up the game needed to avoid complete stagnation even though the game never reaches the kind of white-knuckle battles that would make the action thrilling.
THE VERDICT: The Night Christmas Ended is a mostly amusing twisted Christmas tale that could have better spent some of its short runtime cracking more jokes instead of snickering at how daring it thinks it is for telling some of them. The crude and goofy humor add a bit of personality to this shooter though, and while the levels don’t do much to evolve the core challenge much, the game shifts its design a few times to make up for it. The ricochet system gives it longer legs at least, so while it could have been more if it didn’t settle into its simple selection of enemies, you could do worse than this irreverent Yuletide shooter.
And so, I give The Night Christmas Ended for PC…
An OKAY rating. The Night Christmas Ended does provide a good deal of levels that keep you active to survive without demanding too much from the ricochet system, only the portal-themed stages feeling like their ideas fumble a bit while even the easier flying and normal shooting levels at least ask for some focus to avoid being boxed in. There does seem to be a greater emphasis on breaking away from standard play rather than evolving it though and as such many of the ideas are scraping the surface of the kind of thrills they could have offered had they tried to vary up their content a bit more. The two gun system is a smart way of giving you something to consider as levels can shift from hordes of enemies to a small selection of tough ones, but the game does settle into the bats and hopping mounds for opposition a bit too often and making them more numerous or more durable only goes so far. The game’s brevity does mean it goes by quickly enough that it could hardly be accused of getting stuck in a rut though, and the off-color comedy helps to make it feel lively as the goblin frequently cracks wise or offers a surprising number of compliments. He could do with a bit of an expansion to how many voice lines he has during gameplay though and some of the cutscenes are weakened by taking time to point at a joke they just told rather than letting it stand, but there are some amusing ideas still whether you’re a fan of cheap laughs or some slightly creative swerves.
The Night Christmas Ended feels like the kind of game you get more for its personality, the vulgar jokes and sarcastic attitude a fine fit for people wanting something less saccharine around the holidays. Its shooting is serviceable even if the adventure is short, getting both silver and gold medals in each stage didn’t even lead to me hitting three hours, but it’s at least a quick and sometimes inventive shooter even if it’s more interested in changing the mold rather than refining its gameplay styles. Your Christmas game time will probably be merrier with a more polished shooter, but if you want something seasonally appropriate, this game about a snarky goblin swearing and making lewd propositions is only as off-putting as it wants to be.