The Official Father Christmas (Commodore 64)
When Christmas time rolls around, people return to their comfort media. Holiday classics don’t necessarily need to be good to tap into those seasonal vibes and nostalgic feelings people are seeking, and there’s nothing wrong with attaching your heart to something simply because of the emotions it evokes. The Official Father Christmas feels like the kind of game kids in the microcomputer scene would look back on fondly because of its seasonal associations, the game not outrageously awful so they can still put on some holiday blinders to bask in the Christmas accoutrements regardless of how it actually functions as a game.
The Official Father Christmas features four modes of play, and for three of them you find yourself in the role of Kris Kringle himself. Santa Claus is getting ready for his yearly present deliveries around the world when he faces a rather unexpected setback. His sleigh has been entirely dismantled and scrambled around the workshop, and what’s more, the elves who’d usually help him out are running around the place eager to snatch the sleigh pieces out of Father Christmas’s hands to hide them again. This set-up comprises the first form of play in The Official Father Christmas, and while the side view makes it look a bit like a platformer, poor Santa can’t seem to jump at all. Relying on ladders you navigate the small building interior looking for a sleigh piece so you can then ferry it outside, the player repeating this process until all pieces are gathered.
The Official Father Christmas unfortunately leads with its worst form of play. Since all Santa can do is move left and right or go up and down ladders, the elves scurrying about are a frequent and hard to manage nuisance. Once the sleigh piece is in hand, any contact with one will lead to it being stolen and put somewhere else, and the elves are not only faster than you but there really isn’t too much walking room on any of the game screens. They can appear from the side and blindside you, and even if they don’t, you don’t have much recourse for them besides fleeing in the other direction. They at least have certain set behaviors, in one room the elves always scale a table that slows them down a bit and others will not reach certain parts of a room, but the process of play here is still a rather bland scavenger hunt interrupted repeatedly by the need to run off to avoid being robbed. It is something that you can eventually get through once you start to better understand the movement limitations of the elves, but it’s not a thrilling start and thankfully the beginning is the game’s conceptual low point.
After Father Christmas has his sleigh ready to go, you actually briefly play as yourself. You are now writing a letter to Kris Kringle, much of it already filled in but a few open spaces allow you to add what you wish to receive for Christmas from a small range of available options. The selection of items feels appropriate for the intended young audience and there’s a decent range that even holds up somewhat today. Nothing archaic like a wooden train is presented as an option, and while some are simple toys like dolls or a ball, there are also options like a computer that might better suit the kind of kid who’s celebrating the holiday season with a Christmas video game. There isn’t too much meaning behind whatever you pick, but it does influence a very short minigame afterwards where Santa is running back and forth in a room as toys rain down from above. The ones you wished for are now highlighted in yellow and your goal is to snag them, although there’s no penalty for grabbing the standard white ones and they fall so fast you can probably just run around and quickly win without even trying. While bumbling around the house at the start was the worst the gameplay gets, this middle section comprised of two forms of interaction is more of a mood setter, a bit of Christmas spirit evoked by having the little Santa letter portion despite its simplicity.
To wrap things up, you finally have the delivery section. Santa flies through the night sky in his sled over five different locations around the globe, things starting in expected places like the United States and Europe but Father Christmas even makes sure the people of Antarctica get some gifts this year. Each place looks different, but the meaningful differentiation comes from the obstacles in the way of your deliveries getting speed boosts in later stages. The player controls Father Christmas in his sleigh at the top of the screen, his ride unable to come to a complete stop but depending on how hard and fast you move left or right, you can either tear across the sky or drift along leisurely. A large arrow blinks to indicate the current household you need to deliver to, and Santa sadly doesn’t have the time to get out and go down chimneys this year. Instead, he sends down parachuting presents with the press of a button, and there’s thankfully nothing wrong with missing the house or having the present intercepted as you can just toss another down to try again.
Clouds, birds, and airplanes all make dropping presents in the sky a bit rough, and not really in a particularly engaging way. You need to linger in place and find the gaps between the quick moving dangers, clouds able to cart presents away although birds can sometimes carry the present down to its destination if you’re lucky. The issue arises with the speed of these obstructions, the player already needing to land the present right on the arrow for it to register and thus you’re often just nudging your sleigh back and forth, trying to slip a present through a gap but not always able to best predict if something might appear from off-screen to intercept it. As a result, you just keep dropping gifts repeatedly and eventually it will get through and you can go find another arrow. This makes this portion a bit mindless as the thing that influences your success most is what the game has appear from the edges of the screen, but it is also pretty easy to push through with pure persistence. Your Christmas activities are set to a timer themed as the approach of sunrise though, and if you can’t clear every part of the game from the beginning sleigh construction up to the last delivery you’ll need to start again, but it’s also a game that goes by quickly. With your effectiveness mostly dependent on the whims of mischievous elves and supersonic clouds though, there wouldn’t be much merit in this game’s different play styles if The Official Father Christmas was stripped of its holiday theming.
THE VERDICT: While the sleigh construction at the start is a poorly conceived form of play that can get a bit irritating, The Official Father Christmas is mostly a harmless way to spend a few minutes on a holiday night. You can get through the wish list making and the gift delivery is mostly about persistence rather than skill, but if you’re aren’t just looking for a quick Christmas kick with some holiday tunes produced rather nicely within the Commodore 64’s means, you won’t really find much to enjoy. The moments of play are shallow and rely on little random elements that you can’t account for the best, and your goals are pretty pedestrian so you can’t change up your approach much to increase the odds of success.
And so, I give The Official Father Christmas for Commodore 64…
A BAD rating. Nostalgia and a desire to celebrate the Christmas season has definitely propped up plenty of Christmas media for me, and I don’t blame anyone who attached their heart to this Commodore 64 game. With the game’s sales contributing to the Save the Children fund, it really doesn’t feel like a cynical attempt to exploit the holiday season for high sales either. Even the actual game design is endearing in a way, the creators trying to provide a varied experience, one that young players would be able to easily understand and engage with. Those sections do range from inoffensive to designed to waste time though, meaning the Christmas coat of paint is really meant to be the draw with the interactive sections more about the holiday theme than being entertaining. It’s easy to see a parent and young child at the computer playing through this together, some warm fuzzy winter memory that kid will cling to for the rest of their life, but it would still be just as meaningful if the elves weren’t such pests and if the gift delivery wasn’t about hovering back and forth until your presents slip through.
Even though I’ve covered quite a few Christmas games, The Official Father Christmas, despite its flaws, feels like it might deserve that odd inclusion of “official” in the name. Whether or not Santa Claus could actually endorse it is an odd question, but this feels like it’s just trying to be a little Christmas romp that hits the beats you’d hope to expect from a short Santa themed game. We put on the same holiday movies and listen to the same festive music every year without much consideration for their quality or design, and were it not made for old computers like the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, and Amstrad CPC, it feels like The Official Father Christmas could be just another part of those yearly traditions.