Indie Gaming Theater - Kramp me, Kramp you, Krampus

Welcome to Indie Gaming Theater, where I take a discounted, barely-reviewed indie game from Steam's stacks and take a close, honest look at it. For more details on what this feature aims to do, go here to check out my lengthy preamble. Otherwise, enjoy!

Krampus

It might not be Christmas, but here at Sparky's Indie Game Theater laboratories, we're always up for some holiday cheer, especially when said cheer involves a horrific spin on the good ol' Saint Nick legend. The myth of Krampus is a pretty simple one - instead of a jolly old fat man cramming his ass down a chimney in the dead of night and sucking down all the Christmas booze, milk, and cookies while occasionally macking on moms like your skeezy uncle Julian when your dad's passed out at the barbeque (apologies for the mental trauma to all people with uncles named Julian, but c'mon, you know with a name like that, it's happening), Krampus is a delightful goat-devil who is sent to please the grumpy Sparky Buzzsaws of this world by whacking naughty kids with chains and dragging them off to hell.

That's right - this guy actually DOES something about the bratty little shits out there, and we vilify him as a nightmare story. Whoever reps the Kardashians of this world, think about taking Krampus under your wing, huh? He needs you because he's a goddamn hero.

That's oversimplifying things a bit, but for the purposes of this blog, that's a very quick and loose definition of the Krampus myth. He's supposedly "evil" Santa Claus, The myth's purpose was to largely scare bad children straight and to let people get down with their bad selves, as stated (in much more flowery terms) by National Geographic here.

Krampus, the independent video game developed and published by the much-into-brevity Peace, follows the relative basics of the myth to a letter. Around Christmastime, a boy and his mother arrive at a new home, apart from the boy's father who is off working for... I don't know, Fathertopia Incorporated, or something. The point is, he's an absentee dad who has left his wife and child in a mansion apparently designed by a drunk Jareth the Goblin King. It has something like eighteen bedrooms and a zig-zaggy basement, but only one bathroom. One. And it's clear across the house from the study, necessitating a trip down two flights of stairs, through a migraine-inducing basement and back up a flight if someone was working in the office and had to take a leak. I don't know about you, but If I'm gonna buy a mansion, I'd at least want thunder pots.

Also, how great of a phrase is thunder pots? Because holy shit.

Anyways, the boy prepares for Christmas by building a snowman by himself, shoveling snow by himself, hanging decorations by himself, picking up toys by himself, drinking milk and eating cookies by himself, and in general doing everything by himself. I mean, it kind of makes sense from the mother's perspective. She's probably piss-ass drunk from having to hang with her overachieving kid solo on Christmas Eve. I think we've all been there with our buddies Hot and Toddy, am I right? Yeah, let's hear it for alcoholism and neglectful parenting!

Anyways, his chores done, the boy heads to bed - or rather, stands in his room next to the bed like some Asimovian creature being powered down for the night. He's woken up by footfalls outside his door, and discovers his mom's been taken by the criminally misunderstood Krampus because the boy's been too spoiled in his life and deserves to be punished.

Right fucking on, Mr. K. I heart you already.

Instead of the story ending there and me standing and applauding this brilliant game, it instead decides to continue on as the boy wanders the house looking for his mom. Why, I have no idea. She's a shit mother who was locked away in her room on Christmas night while her kid probably dreams of friendship and daddies and not having to clean up his mommy's vomit off the bathroom tiles because she had one too many sidecars.

Shit. Now I want a sidecar. And a hot toddy. I need a bartender for this feature already and we're not even through the first one.

Anyways, the game becomes a search through the house as the kid tries to find his mother. Pretty simple setup, but not a bad one. It could have been quite the opportunity to create some real scares - after all, seen through the eyes of a child, a house like that could be utterly terrifying.

Unfortunately, the story never quite capitalizes on the potential of the nightmare situation or the dream-like quality to a lot of the household. All of the scares presented here are either done by audio cues or brief - under a second - flashes of Krampus or things appearing where they weren't before. These are only done once or twice, unfortunately.

As a game, Krampus is very much just a brief exploratory game with very light puzzle elements thrown in once or twice. For the purposes of the game itself, that's fine. It didn't need to be anything more than what it was and the simplistic gameplay is a good fit for the story. That said, it's over fast. I finished in less than a couple of hours, and at least an hour and a half of that was padded by me simply not being able to see jack shit in the house's dark environments.

That's the game's second biggest problem - darkness. Though the house has a number of lights, many of the objects you need to find are unfairly tucked away in dark corners. There are absolutely no options within the game itself, so there were no sliders for lighting or anything like that. Again,t he game is so brief that the options shouldn't have mattered, but when you have players search corners of a house and your lighting effects can't help them, that's a problem.

It's also fairly buggy. The game didn't auto-save correctly between the opening scene and the next one, so I had to redo the beginning sections again. Once you know where the objects are, that takes all of about a minute, but it's still a chore. Er, literally, I guess, since it's on a list of chores given to you. The game crashed out to the desktop once, and one section saw me locked in a room with no way to escape because I didn't think to explore the house before I investigated the next obvious story beat. That's bad game design - the key should have been in the room with the player character, as they're not going to assume they'll be forced to load a save if they actually go where the developer seems to point them.

Krampus's biggest problem lies in its conclusion. The last level is kind of neat, as you explore your dad's small office and prepare to find your mom. You wander through an endless hallways, opening the same door over and over again while new words describing your situation are etched on the walls (including "bad education," which is now something I wish I could tag on a train for no good reason). The game ends all too briefly, though, as you open the last door, you're shown a quick flash of the child moving towards his mother's bedroom and... nothing. Nada. That's it, you're done. Fuck off, hope you enjoyed the game. It's like the Sopranos, if the Sopranos didn't have an episode of Tony tripping balls on Indian food and an entire season about a guy named Furio. Furio. How badass of a name was that?

So is Krampus worth your time? Nah. It's a brief proof of concept with some neat ideas behind its basic setup and some real potential if someone were to revisit the theme of a child searching a haunted home for his parents, but overall, it's just not scary or unique enough to really recommend.

Krampus is available on Steam. It's listed regularly at $5. Sadly, no DLC is available for the goat-guy to come punish those loud neighbor kids that keep pounding metalcore until the crack of dawn.