Reviews
SantaCraft

SantaCraft

SantaCraft is a short and sweet Christmas themed game that could prove to be the perfect choice if you’re looking to play something seasonal. It’s a sandbox game in which you take the role of Santa Claus, looking to recover his lost reindeer and sleigh and prepare for the upcoming holidays.

The game focuses on collecting resources by mining the blocks that the world is made of and crafting all sorts of items by combining them in your inventory. The resulting products are then used to solve quests or simply to build your own Christmas town around the North Pole. Every sandbox element is adorably Christmasified: snow blocks cover the whole map (and you’ll have to dig a path through them), the trees are gingerbread cookies, the rocks are made of chocolate, the minerals are lollipops or candy canes and you fish Christmas taffy out of water spots. With these basic resources combined, you can create either the tools needed to harvest them, or some other intermediary items, and ultimately whole buildings or decorations for your North Pole town.

The map is reasonably large – neither too big nor too small – and is very rich in resources, therefore you will not have issues finding what you need; none of the materials required for crafting are rare, and the durability of the tools is extremely decent. The resources can also be infinitely replenished at the end of the game by talking with a certain NPC.

Some of the NPCs are the ones who stole Santa’s reindeer and sleigh and in order to recover them you’ll need to complete the quests they give you (it’s usually gathering certain animals, or crafting specific items). There are 14 of these main quests and 15 secondary ones – plenty to do to keep you busy for around 2-3 hours. The dialogues are witty and entertaining, filled with word jokes and subtle laughter.

At the end of the game, when all the quests are complete, you can continue playing indefinitely, harvesting resources and expanding your Christmas town. Apart from several types of elf houses, you can place all sorts of buildings (bakery, workshop, library, ice rink etc), connect them with roads and decorate the town with Christmas trees, gifts, garlands, lights. These are purely cosmetic though and there’s no production chain involved. This year’s update brought new mechanics to the game, with the addition of trains, train stations and tracks. You can even ride the train between stations and change the direction at the intersections, it’s a very cool feature.

Aside from having the necessary tools for harvesting resources, you can also discover various equipment items, each of them giving you a special bonus. These are automatically displayed in the action bar when equipped and you can quickly cycle through them by clicking on the corresponding icon. There are also some funny items to collect that act like Easter eggs – for example a radio that can change the pitch of your background music when interacting with it (and 8-bitifying it).

Overall, I greatly enjoyed my time spent in SantaCraft, despite the fact that the game does not have achievements at the moment (I’m still hoping that they will be added in the future, even though the developers mentioned that their team is composed of 2 people only and their time is really scarce). It’s a pretty wholesome game at the modest price of $5 (with lots of replayability value as well), and playing it was for me as cozy as sipping a mug of hot chocolate on a cold winter night.

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