Christmas is a special time for families all over the world, and thankfully it’s over. Few games try to tackle the topic of Christmas, likely because it’s so traumatic. For better or for worse, developer RuneStorm has crafted a video game almost as scarring as the mere concept of Christmas.
Viscera Cleanup Detail: Santa’s Rampage puts you in the shoes of the janitor tasked with cleaning Santa’s workshop after the iconic Christmas figure has finally snapped and gone on a killing spree, offing all his elves and reindeer and leaving the place an utter mess. It’s your job to pick up the pieces, literally.
You enter the sullied workshop armed with the tools of your trade: a mop, a “sniffer” device that pinpoints what needs to be discarded or cleaned and your bare hands. The mop is used to scrub away blood and soot and, using your creepy Ronald-McDonald-looking hands, you can manipulate nearly any of the items and appendages found in the workshop.
Unfortunately, manipulating items is far from perfect. Though debris and limbs can be righted and centered in your grasp with the click of a button, there is a distinct lack of control over items in the world. This makes tasks like stuffing an entire elf inside of a biohazard bin needlessly complex and finicky. I found myself wishing for a greater level of control over items. The ability to move and inspect objects on a 3D axis like in Gone Home would have been a huge improvement, and, wow, did I just compare this game to Gone Home?
At its core, Santa’s Rampagehates you. Water buckets and hazardous material bins are produced by their respective dispensers, which work most of the time. Occasionally, though, these machines malfunction and spit out more body parts which dirty areas you’ve already cleaned. On rare occasions they produce sticks of lit dynamite which, upon exploding, send the contents of the workshop rocketing every which way. That is if they don’t kill you first.
The game is filled with such whimsical traps. Tread through a pool of blood or a pile of soot and you’ll leave footprints behind. Try and clean one of these footprints with a dirty mop and you’ll just leave a bigger mess. And finally, when you think you’ve got a room spotless, you find a set of loose floorboards hiding terrible secrets and can only mutter a soft “Goddammit, Santa” to yourself. For all its bloated shock value, Santa’s Rampage is a game that rewards slow, methodical attention to detail, and like the dispensers, it works sometimes.
Santa’s Rampage is a buggy game. One bug I encountered numerous times caused elf limbs placed in hazardous material bins to phase through their containers over time. When I first played Santa’s Rampage I horded my bins in a hallway, thinking I was being clever and organized. Eventually, though, the contents of the bins started to creep through the walls of their confines and, through the magic of video game physics,they began to squirm around as if the creature from John Carpenter’s The Thing was doing a very bad job of transforming into a recycling bin. Whether intentional or not, this bug taught me not to horde bins and to instead cast all of my refuse into the workshop’s fireplace because that seems like typical janitorial procedure.
There isn’t much of a story to Santa’s Rampage, but that which does surface, in the form of notes found throughout the workshop, ranges from middling to disappointing. References to Krampus as Santa’s ne’er-do-well brother elicited a chuckle, but the notes from naughty children demanding elaborate gifts seemed to be trying a bit too hard and the jokes didn’t really hit home. I did appreciate the overall narrative of the game and its insistence on keeping you away from actually spilling any blood.
Santa’s Rampage might be awkward to play at times, and the shock of piling dismembered elves into bins and incinerating them wears off pretty quickly, but the true appeal of the game comes after you’ve disposed of all of the viscera and you’re just left with a sort of dirty workshop. At that point Santa’s Rampage becomes a game of tracking down every smudge, stain, shell casing, shattered Christmas ornament, and so on until the workshop is spotless. It’s actually rather relaxing until the very end, when your sniffer machine insists there is debris to be found but lacks any specificity about its location or type.
Viscera Cleanup Detail: Santa’s Rampage is a strange little sandbox that commits to its unique narrative. Whereas most games would cast you in the role of the murderous Santa, mowing down elves left and right, your job in Santa’s Rampage is to clean up after just such a spree and the game sticks to its guns on that point. It also works, for the most part, and is probably prettier than it deserves to be. Those are things I can respect, and if it feels awkward, excessive or overly self-indulgent in parts, then maybe it really does capture the holiday spirit.
