The Elf on the Shelf: Christmas Heroes (PS5)
The Elf on the Shelf is one of the more recent Christmas traditions to have caught on rather well. The idea is a specific Scout Elf will be assigned to your family to watch the kids and report to Santa whether they’ve been naughty or nice. Some families have fun with the idea, moving the elf into a new spot every night, but for the purposes of today’s game review perhaps the most important thing to know is The Elf on the Shelf is a specific toy brand owned by The Lumistella Company, thus making it eligible for adaptation by serial licensed game producer Outright Games. Two years ago Outright Games sought to cash in on the Christmas season with The Grinch: Christmas Adventures, and with The Elf on the Shelf: Christmas Heroes also being a 2D platformer, it’s easy to think this would just be some rebrand. The same development team did work on both games, but it seems this year Christmas has warmed their hearts a touch, The Elf on the Shelf: Christmas Heroes at least seeming to have learned some lessons on how to make the action less terrible.
The Elf on the Shelf: Christmas Heroes allows you to customize your elf and name them from a mix of preset suggested words, but while the almost foot tall elf is personalized, its duty is to a very specific unseen family. The playable scout elf is sent by Santa Claus and the other elves not just to watch over a specific family’s house for the naughty and nice report, but it seems this year Christmas Spirit is also in short supply. While it’s a bit nebulous why Christmas Spirit is so important exactly and even less clear why Christmas Spirit takes the form of floating balls of golden light littered all about, your scouting duties also require you to walk around each night either through the family house or somewhere like Santa’s workshop to gather the Christmas Spirit. In one of the cuter touches, the game’s level select takes the form of an advent calendar meaning there are exactly 24 levels in total although thankfully you do not need to wait for real days to pass to play the next one.
When it comes to the majority of the levels you find yourself in, there is some appeal to the elf being such a tiny character. Already they look like a fairly good match for the real toys down to the somewhat plastic molding of their face and the overly jolly smiles, The Elf on the Shelf: Christmas Heroes unapologetic in being about simple child-friendly holiday cheer. Your elf isn’t truly in much danger, their time walking about the house or North Pole not featuring any possible way to fully lose, and when the Scout Elf does bump into something dangerous, they’re not really harmed much. They drop some of the Christmas Spirit orbs and you can collect them if your fast, but the ones you don’t grab will just reappear where they were originally found, and with each level having a set amount of Christmas Spirit to collect, you can at least usually backtrack if you do take a hit. You don’t need all the Christmas Spirit to succeed or anything though, and enemies mostly take the form of little toys repeating the same actions over and over. Little wood planes flying back and forth, robots walking a simple patrol, yo-yos that go up and down, and nutcrackers popping out of doors make up the primary dangers and most can be either jumped over or jumped on. You might get a snowball to freeze them for a surprisingly short period, but enemies mostly just exist to keep you moving around, platforming also fairly frequent and not totally mindless. You can fall down pits, sometimes even landing on piles of sharp things like thumbtacks or toothpicks, but the elf just flies up and away after so its not as harsh as it sounds. The navigation won’t put up much of a fight for a player who has played other platformers, but it’s also going to keep a younger player moving frequently so it doesn’t become totally boring.
That’s not to say it isn’t a rather hollow experience. The environments can sometimes have fun details like the elf jumping around a wide variety of toy boxes or seeing different regions of the house like a kitchen and home cinema, but the navigation is often very straightforward where you just need to do the obvious jumps ahead of you until you find the level’s end, few stages really ramping things up. The game does try to get a bit tougher near the end with a lot more moving platforms and dangers working in tandem, although when it does break out of the norm it also gets into touchy territory with things like the floating sections involving a reindeer balloon that can be a bit unwieldy. However, very early on you do get a double jump as well as a midair dash, these skills a godsend for helping speed up the action even when it is being mundane. Sometimes there are little side paths as well for extra Christmas Spirit collectables or doors that lead to a range of short minigames.
The Elf on the Shelf: Christmas Heroes offers four different minigame types and they can be played either until you lose from the main menu or in increasing difficulties as they’re encountered along the journey. All of them are timed but rather generous with their timers so kids won’t feel too pressured, but it also makes it hard to lose. One minigame takes the form of a jigsaw puzzle where you use rather large pieces to construct a scene from one of the Elf Pets animated shorts, a clip then playing that sometimes plays a fraction of a song but can also include a pretty out of context scene that makes them rather strange rewards. The cursor used for the jigsaw puzzles does feel a little slow, this also an issue over in the memory game where you match cards with Christmas items on them. Memory can become a rather huge game in later levels but it’s not exactly more interesting just because it takes longer to make pairs, but one game that feels a touch more creative involves decorating. Ornaments will all be placed in columns and you need to sort them so all the similar ornaments are in the same column, this still not difficult per se but it requires some forethought and planning compared to other minigames since you can only remove the top ornament from a column. The last minigame is a strange one in that it’s probably the least interesting to play but one you’ll be happy to see. The game features a top-down maze game where parts of the maze are off-screen until you get close enough to them, but while that does mean it can take you down dead ends since you can’t pick the right path right away, you can use the game’s run button to clear mazes more quickly and unlike the others it doesn’t go from super easy to slow drags as they increase in difficulty over the game’s course.
The minigames are a fairly weak bit of extra content, but there is one special level type you occasionally encounter that does truly get better the more it appears. Certain levels see your Scout Elf flying up above a snow covered city on their way back to the North Pole, the scenery rather pretty and the flying mostly just about moving around to gather some Christmas Spirit. At first the collectibles are not going to give you any trouble, your flight is technically locked to the three lanes so you just need to press left and right to hop between them and gather the orbs. However, later levels add the ability to fly up and down as well, and with nine lanes to manage and some Christmas Spirit that requires faster lane swapping to grab, these stages get a bit more interesting even if there’s not a huge incentive to clear them properly since you only need 5,000 Christmas Spirit orbs in total to beat the game and most levels have 300 or more. It still isn’t very challenging, but it hews closer to the idea behind the game’s platforming where it tries to keep you constantly moving and active, that perhaps one reason the often slow minigames feel like nuisances the further into the adventure you go and the longer they take to clear.
THE VERDICT: There are better games to get a kid for Christmas than The Elf on the Shelf: Christmas Heroes, but if a well-intentioned grandparent does send it a child’s way, it has a chance of holding their attention for the few hours it takes to clear. The minigames do slow the pace and often get worse the harder they are, the flying stages take a while to get interesting, and the platforming is often very straightforward, but collecting Christmas Spirit and having levels require leaping about so much does mean it is repetitive but usually not outright slow traversal that await them. An adult familiar with platformers has no business with it but it’s not a grueling, sloppy, or laborious experience, it’s just rather weak and fairly unambitious.
And so, I give The Elf on the Shelf: Christmas Heroes for PlayStation 5…
A BAD rating. The development team responsible for The Elf on the Shelf: Christmas Heroes, Casual Brother Ltd., seems to be gradually learning that decent movement skills can add some extra life to a platformer, although they also can’t help but throw in things that slow the game down to no benefit. The double jump and dash are great for skipping past waiting sections or correcting jumps, the game fairly speedy if you make good use of these options. However, the minigames wear out their welcome because they often get worse as they get more difficult since taking the time to clear them is often the main factor rather than them being tests of planning or skill. Level navigation does often give you reasons to jump around and collect Christmas Spirit, but the path forward is often pretty plain in terms of identifying what you need to do and executing it. Even then, you can choose often to jump over enemies rather than bop them, so you can further simplify moments and keep moving. The fact you can clear the game fairly quickly is a positive because it means the monotony doesn’t have too much time to set in, that helped along by the backgrounds and other cute Christmasy touches, but the branding and holiday accoutrements end up more interesting than the gameplay and they aren’t exactly going the extra mile with how they’re realized either.
As always, it’s going to be hard to recommend a Christmas themed game because Christmas is the time of year children can often get more expensive and high quality amusements without price being as much of an issue. With this game normally going for 40 dollars, you could give a young gamer a lot more holiday cheer for that price than this short, straightforward, and often uninspired platformer. It’s not as bad as some of the depths of Outright Games’s catalogue of licensed titles and an adult can clear it fairly quickly and leave mostly bored rather than irritated, but even if you have a Scout Elf on your shelf watching your actions, don’t feel you need to give this game as a gift to anyone. If you are on the nice list, this certainly wouldn’t be the kind of gift Santa would reward you with.