The Turkey of Christmas Past

I have a soft spot for the weird little games that slip onto Steam in December with no fanfare and approximately four reviews, and this one is exactly that kind of oddity. Dinan Studios released this third-person hack-and-slash action game in late 2016 with a premise that commits fully to its own absurdity: Tom de Cat, armored swordsman, holds the line against a horde of zombie-like turkeys invading a castle. That sincerity of concept is genuinely charming for about the first twenty minutes. The combat toolkit is more varied than the price bracket might suggest. Tom can slash with his sword, fire ranged attacks, deploy mousetraps that function as purple-glowing stun charges, and trigger a special ability the game calls Felid Power. Ammo and healing resources refill at color-coded stone pillars scattered through the environment, and enemy waves pour in through portals. The structure is essentially a room-by-room survival gauntlet: find the key masters, elite enemy types that unlock new doors in the castle, defeat them, move deeper. The tone sits somewhere between Dynasty Warriors and a very low-budget Dark Souls, complete with a darkly atmospheric original soundtrack that, genuinely, works better than it has any right to. The music carries a sombre weight that creates a strange contrast with the turkey premise, and I mean that as a compliment. Someone on that small team cared about the soundscape. Here is where honesty demands its space. The sole professional critic review that exists for this game, from Italian outlet Everyeye.it, scored it a 40 and flagged repetitive gameplay and weak level design. Those criticisms are accurate. The castle rooms feel samey, the wave structure offers very little variation, and there is no map whatsoever. Community discussions from release week confirm a harder problem: no in-game keyboard map, menus that sometimes fail to register mouse input, and enemy waves that can stall and refuse to spawn for minutes at a time. A gamepad thread was among the first posts after launch, suggesting controller support is inconsistent. These are not charming rough edges. They are friction that will end a session. Who is this actually for? Curious players who enjoy picking through strange, small, handcrafted oddities and can tolerate jank as part of the texture. If you need tight mechanics, clear progression, or any form of build variety, look elsewhere. If you are the kind of person who finds something quietly interesting in a one-studio game that arrived at Christmas 2016 with a zombie turkey army and a brooding orchestral score, there is a short, peculiar thing here that rewards patience more than skill. It knows roughly what it wants to be. It just never quite got there technically.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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