10 Festive Video Games To Play During Christmas 2018

Why is it that there are so few explicitly Christmas-themed video games? The film industry is absolutely lousy with Yuletide cinema, and the primetime TV airwaves can hardly go a day without broadcasting Tim Allen’s begrudging rendition of Santa Claus or Will Ferrell's overly-cheerily elf persona.

Yet, do holiday-centric games hit the shelves every year? Well, aside from a few seasonal Steam indie releases, that just isn’t the case.

Christmas is often a joyous time for gamers; we can count on Santa to leave a sackful of games beneath the tree, and the cold weather means that we have an added incentive to stay indoors. Unfortunately, it’s tough to get in the Christmas spirit when so few games actually cater to these festive needs. Plus, as the days melt away from the advent calendar, playing the same old games feels increasingly wrong.

It’s hard to go from watching The Polar Express on Lifetime to playing Doom or PUBG, and nobody wants Santa to check up on them when they happen to be playing Sakura Spirit. With that in mind, here are ten games guaranteed to help ring in the holiday season.

The cheesy name aside, 1994’s Daze Before Christmas was a relatively decent platformer published by Sunsoft in Australia and Europe. Curiously, a port never made it to the North American market because the company filed for bankruptcy before such a conversion could be completed.

There isn’t much in the way of Christmas-themed gaming experiences on the Super Nintendo, so retro Nintendo enthusiasts have to take what they can get. Fortunately, the game holds up well enough and is comparable to most second-rate mascot platformers of the era. Much like if Saint Nick were in an open-world FPS today, the developers weren’t trying to re-invent the wheel and simply stuck with what was popular at the time.

Following Santa on a 24 day journey to recover some items stolen by an evil snowman, the plot is absolutely nothing to write home about. Yet, the levels are mostly festive and visually unique, and there are certainly worse holiday-themed games out there.

The only real issue with the title is it’s absurd rarity—interested gamers may want to settle for emulating this one. That shouldn’t be taken as an endorsement for piracy, the game is just totally unavailable in most regions.