DarkParkGames: Dear Santa

Lacklustre puzzles yet some really fun moments. The story could have been more polished 

Agree with the review that called it a "mish mash" of ideas.  Narratively unsound, with an ending that made me feel jerked around and annoyed.  Lovely prop quality and the seeds of something really emotional and moving, but not executed well.

In the nature of the star ratings, I can't justify calling this anything other than 'flawed but okay '. but still consider this better than what I would rate that 'low'.  As an escape at home box goes, it's well made. Great production quality, decent length and a lovely variety of things to look into. Yet while going through the game we couldn't help feel like it was an untested mish mash of two unrelated games, rushed out to hit the Christmas market.

Marketed with a tagline 'Time to start believing in Santa again' you may assume you're going to get a light, whimsical tale that is fun for a family of all ages. This is definitely not that. Since we played, the company has added a warning to their website, which I'm really pleased about, yet still feel like it is being marketed as a game for kids, whereas thematically I do not feel that it should be.

Now, when I say the game feels like it was untested, I understand misprints happen - not a problem really, as long as there's a way of avoiding the problem, or the errors are dealt with in a smart, way. Doing this without spoilers is often a difficulty task, yet in this game the misprint is hidden within a hint. You actually have to try a puzzle, fail enough to want to take a hint before you even know there is anything wrong. As puzzlers that love overcoming challenging parts of a game, even if it takes us forever, this was disappointing and lost us our faith in the game, after wasting so much time on something that wasn't even possible to give us the correct answer. We hunted high and low for something we'd missed, and instead, at the point of giving up, hoping the solution was cleverer than we were, we were faced with a mistake that the developer already knew about. A good tester would have firstly spotted the problem and secondly, even if it had gone to print, suggested that the misprint were brought to the player's attention before they give up on the puzzle.

A couple of other puzzles seemed to be based upon guesswork, and even though we used some educated guesswork to find the solution, we weren't sure that we were meant to enough to take another look at the hints to check how we were meant to know. The hint said something to the tune of 'this page tells you this', which it didn't, as far as we could see.

Then there was the way most of the solutions were given. If you'd played Witchery Spell, you may notice a familiar 'input' mechanism. Essentially a website with a series of questions that only by getting them all right can you get to the next section. Only it won't tell you which you get wrong, which means that any uncertainty in the answers could lead to failing you and making you have to start again. That is, if you haven't spotted how the designers had actually made the system. If you have, it becomes incredibly tempting to just cheat every time you aren't sure. Yes, that's on the player, so arguably you can't complain about that, but it revealed something worse about this design. Remember, one wrong answer and you will have to try again, with no clue as to what is wrong, so if you're playing legitimately, you'd better be sure about every thing you put in. There was one part that actually had two correct answers - not justifiably in the game - just that there was no way of knowing which answer was right. Without wanting to spoil anything, imagine the question was 'What happened next? A, B, C or D?' Your list of options can be narrowed down to two using some clever puzzling. Okay, so it's down to A or B. Knowing that the game won't tell you if you pick the wrong one, and not wanting to guess the answer, we spent a frustrating amount of time searching for something else in what had become a large compendium of items and information, hoping that something somewhere else would have reference to either A or B. Instead, there was no 'correct solution'. Either A or B would have let us through, and our desire to avoid guessing meant that we suffered needlessly, because the game had no correct answer. Schrodinger's options instead, one might say.

Another puzzle gives you a few different options for solutions. Maybe it's numbers, no telegraphing about the order - Maybe it's letters, but they don't fit together to make a word. The bare minimum of telegraphing - basically 'use this puzzle's answer here' doesn't tell you what you're looking for, and none of the potentials seem more likely than the others. We guessed correctly, while saying 'I hope it's more clever than this'. It wasn't.

Now, while the game initially seemed non linear, by the end it seemed clear that it was heading towards 'give this answer -> get the next important clue -> use that to solve something else -> repeat' territory, there was even a puzzle that while we loved its execution, didn't even lead anywhere. It seemed to be only bringing forward a plot that ended up being irrelevant, and never paid off. Certainly the puzzle had some cool features, that clearly wouldn't have been cheap or easy to just slip in, which led us to believe the game had been pivoted from a mystery story about what happened to someone into a Christmas cash in. The finale confirmed this, with a complete plot twist (and I don't mean in the traditional sense) to become something seemingly irrelevant beforehand, like a bad whodunnit giving you a few options for who committed a murder, only to have the narrator wake up in the final scene, with no crime committed.

Honestly, it's not a bad game. It has some fun elements, and some great production quality, but after finishing it, I was annoyed enough to come on here and write down my thoughts. It needed a tiny bit of testing, and perhaps a little focus on the story.

It was very good looking and much fun too play with the family