Indie Game of the Week 394: Cthulhu Saves Christmas

It's November 1st, y'all, which means the Christmas season is upon us. That's right, I'm one of those crazies that starts celebrating the moment the Halloween decorations go down, and by "celebrate" I mean "dread with every fiber of my being" as seasonal affective disorder descends upon us like a tidal wave of anti-depressant pill bottles. That's why Cthulhu Saves Christmas's idea of linking Christmas to horror—hardly the first time it's been done, and with good reason—always resonates with me and those plucky JRPG throwback developers Zeboyd Games are well primed to deliver a game that isn't afraid to say that Christmas kinda blows. Well, I don't know if that's actually the message, but it's my take away.

Zeboyd has a very particular way of going about their RPGs but they are invariably games in which every encounter presents a decent challenge and every new ability or piece of equipment makes a meaningful difference to your tactics going forward. Due to the truncation process—Zeboyd RPGs rarely go beyond 10 hours in length—it feels like playing one of those retro RPG remasters with a newly added fast-forward function, since you're getting all the killer of the 16-bit RPG archetype with far less of the filler. Combat is your standard turn-based affair with characters assigned a turn order based on their speed, using a combination of elemental and physical attacks along with status effects, heals, and other support skills. One regular status effect for the Cthulhu games in particular is the titular squid's ability to turn enemies insane: this changes their elemental weaknesses as well as make it so certain other status effects are more effective, but the newly gaga foes tend to hit harder as a drawback making it risky for bosses especially. The rest of your team, acquired automatically as the story continues, include a "snow maiden" magic-user, a debuffing witch (the Baba Yaga, no less), and the Teutonic gift- and punishment-bringer Belsnickel who is more of an all-rounder whose abilities can be customized for a preferred role to complete the ensemble. While it does persist with 16-bit-style random encounters there are various means to mitigate them: you can cancel the encounter trigger if you're quick enough to avoid any unnecessary fighting, or you can immediately manually trigger all the encounters available in the current dungeon one after the other to get them out of the way and let you explore at your leisure, with a bonus heap of XP awarded for finishing off the whole set.

One new mechanic that I don't think I've encountered before in these Zeboyd games, though it has been a while since I played Cthulhu Saves the World, is how your combat abilities are assigned. Most of your attacks are single-use and you need to defend to refresh them, however beyond the four you're able to assign before a battle starts you also have three "insanity slots" (Cthulhu likes his inscrutable lunacy) that are randomized at the start of battle and every time you hit the defend/refresh option. Some of these picks are exclusive to the insanity selection, meaning you might have a powerful ability that only occasionally makes itself available, while the rest are the abilities you chose not to assign to your four main slots. The effect of this is that you can still try out new skills if you're unsure about their utility and don't want to sacrifice one you already have equipped, as well as giving you a bit a procgen aspect to the current battle's strategy if you find yourself with some insanity picks that have very conditional uses—an example would be a buff that increases the odds of landing a status effect, since it wouldn't normally be as useful as a straight up physical attack or heal to warrant a spot in your regular line-up, but its presence in the insanity pick area might have you considering the other status effect debuffs you have available.

Since the holidays are all about spending time with family and friends, the half-hearted (by design, since we're goofing around) gimmick of Cthulhu Saves Christmas is that you can spend time between dungeons either hanging out with party members or at various Christmassy establishments like the mall, the post office, the movie theater, a cultist assembly hall (they're not as stoked to see Cthulhu as you'd hope), and the beach. There are more locations you can spend time in than you have time to do so, in true FOMO-fomenting Persona style, and each grants a specific weapon, armor, accessory, or item: you get told what they are but not what their effects might be, so it's usually best to aim for items (which you can reuse endlessly, but only once per battle) or equipment that you haven't switched out in a while. The game's also generous enough to leave treasure chests around its dungeons too so no one character tends to fall behind in their equipment, but this social sim aspect is a useful way to boost up any member that might be lagging. Plus, they're pretty funny as social link parodies go.

Unfortunately, for as polished as the game design might be in Zeboyd's RPGs the same can't necessarily be said for the stability. I was right at the end of one of the longer dungeons—you could tell because it had 15 random encounters on the ticker rather than the usual 10—and in the very last fight the game glitched out and made impossible to continue. Since the game refuses to auto-save for reasons as esoteric as the Great Old Ones themselves (maybe it goes against the Christmas spirit?), I lost around 30 minutes of not particularly engrossing progress after restarting from my last physical save at the very start of that same dungeon. There's absolutely zero reason why any of the above should apply to a game made this century, but here we are. Mistakes were made. Easy to forget that, for as slick as these games can be, Indies are frequently lacking in quality control at the end of the day (for fair enough reasons; they don't have huge piles of money to throw at QA divisions).

That annoying setback aside though, Cthulhu Saves Christmas is just as amusing and tactically intriguing as its brethren—whether they happen to involve Cthulhu or not—and I had a (mostly) good time plugging away at its well-considered encounters and its streamlined take on a Persona-style life-sim component. The fourth-wall-breaking humor is, as always, a subjective quality but I found myself appreciating a few of its more wiseacre goofs, especially where the irascible Elder Being and his already close physical resemblance to the Grinch is concerned as he continues to humbug his more festive companions' suggestions to get into the holiday spirit. As for me, I'm just grateful I have the option to not think about Christmas again for a while and instead be distracted by... oh, the US election. Ugh. Awesome.

Rating: 4 out of 5.