The Christmas Gifts

I have a soft spot for the kind of game that one person assembles entirely by hand, pixel by pixel, and quietly uploads to Steam. Anamik Majumdar handled the graphics, the pixel artwork, the level design, and the programming on The Christmas Gifts himself, outsourcing only the music. That kind of handcraft deserves a fair look before you decide whether it belongs in your library. The setup is unapologetically simple: a boy named Kim has had his Christmas presents stolen by rogue creatures who locked them inside magical chests. To open a chest you collect red and blue balls scattered across each of the game's twelve side-scrolling levels, and you fight through waves of enemies using one of two firing modes. Three boss encounters punctuate the run. The whole thing plays like a mid-nineties shareware platformer that somehow got a Steam page in 2018, which is either charming or grating depending on how tolerant you are of rough controls and basic level geometry. The colorful, cartoony pixel art has genuine personality, and the festive backdrop gives it a seasonal warmth that makes it an easy pick-up during December. The difficulty curve is the honest stumbling block. The game markets itself as hard to master, and the trap-heavy level design can genuinely test patience. More critically, a community-reported bug means that if you exhaust your ammunition in certain sections and the game checkpoints you there, the level becomes literally impossible to finish without a restart. That is a meaningful flaw in a game this short. The developer acknowledged community feedback, but as of the last available information no comprehensive patch appears to have resolved it entirely. Keep a habit of conserving shots and you can largely avoid the issue, but you should know it exists before you sink into a level. For players who grew up on old-school platformers and want something that takes maybe an hour or two to complete, this scratches a very specific itch. It is not trying to be Shovel Knight. It is one developer making something festive and functional, and on that modest promise it more or less delivers. If your tolerance for rough edges is low, or you need polished platforming feel, the limitations here will frustrate faster than the bosses will. But if you can meet a small solo project where it lives, there is a genuine little holiday loop in here worth a quiet playthrough.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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