The Last Christmas Present (JG Heithcock)
Played on: 9th October
How I played it: Downloaded and ran on Windows Git
How long I spent: 1hr 20min to beat the game and look at the feelies
This game is a short little scavenger hunt based on an event from the author’s personal life. You play as a twelve-year-old girl using a Marauder’s Map (i.e. the magic map from Harry Potter) of her house to hunt for her final Christmas present. It’s a parser game which can be completed in a little over an hour.
This is a short and sweet slice-of-life puzzle game with a map-reading gimmick. Much of the game is spent cross-referencing the map with the layout of the house in order to find secrets. The map is integrated well into the game as a central puzzle object. It feels as tactile as it can in a text-only game, giving you pages to flip and a couple of flaps to open. It’s a little like an interactive fiction version of those MIT Mystery Hunt puzzles which give the teams some papercraft to do. There’s also a thoughtful game feature which triggers when you read each page of the map: the Harry Potter-y names it gives to the rooms of the house appear in the game descriptions to help you cross-reference. There are a couple of extra in-game hints in the map which will mean more to players who know their Harry Potter books, but they’re not necessary to beat the game and I solved a lot of the puzzles before realising they were there.
(A sidebar here, because it’s something I can’t leave unsaid in good conscience. I am non-binary, and after JK Rowling’s cruelty to the trans community (in addition to the rest of her political weirdness), my distaste for Harry Potter stuff is now limitless. I don’t begrudge the author this and I’m not docking any points for it, because this is a scavenger hunt for a preteen girl who loves the biggest children’s media franchise of the 21st century. I don’t expect young Morgan or her papa to be plugged into the discourse of online transphobia, and I’m not asking that the game stop dead to say something Important about trans rights, because it’s not (and shouldn’t have to be) that kind of game. Still, though, it’s something that’s going to colour my perception in a way that the author can’t control. Sorry, I won’t mention it again.)
The puzzles themselves are simple enough, and structured well. Simple puzzles in individual parts of the house give way to a couple of larger put-it-all-together puzzles in the back half. The Last Christmas Present tries to stop you skipping ahead by setting a few hidden triggers – for example, you can’t find a few things until you’ve read a part of the map that proves it’s there. This stumped me a little in the back half because I knew what to do but I hadn’t proven it in-game yet, but I don’t think I mind that. This is a recreation of a real scavenger hunt, after all, and the player character is a real person, and I think it’s fair enough to ground the game in what she actually did rather than let the player speedrun things.
There has been some good testing on this game, as the credits show, but I think a few more testers could have been useful, because I found a lot of hitches and little frustrations. I fell at the first hurdle because I hadn’t realised you can open the flaps on the map; I had tried “open flap” but in fact the correct syntax is “open flaps”. At a later stage, I failed to put something on something because the correct syntax was “put something IN something” even though the thing you’re putting other things in is not a container. Does that make sense? I’m trying to avoid puzzle spoilers. The point is, I think a lot of reasonable synonyms are missing.
There’s also a trick where a couple of puzzles are obscured by finding the right thing to examine. One important item is hidden in nested descriptions; a couple of important things are revealed by examining the same objects multiple times; one item is hidden in a piece of scenery which isn’t always mentioned to the player because the description of that location has a random element to it. This isn’t that much of a complaint, since a lot of classic text adventures play with examining objects and scenery in similar ways (although the random-description thing is pretty egregious in my opinion; it’s a good thing that the cluing is strong enough that a player is likely to linger there and keep looking). But it is a curiosity in that it changes the nature of the scavenger hunt. Presumably it was immediately obvious to Morgan where to look in the real scavenger hunt, taking place as it did in her own house which she could see. The player of this text adventure has no such familiarity and has to do a lot more work to even be sure what’s in the room with them. I’m reminded of the reviews for Hard Puzzle, many of which focus on how little help that game’s responses deliberately give you, and how untrustworthy it subsequently feels. Scavenger-hunting in the text adventure, by virtue of missing immediate visuality, feels fundamentally different to scavenger-hunting in real life. I don’t know where I’m going with this and I don’t hold it against The Last Christmas Present, but it is something very interesting about text games to me.
Honestly, I think the biggest pleasure of The Last Christmas Present exists outside of the game. In the readme you get when you download the zip file, there are links to two bonus features: an interactive version of the Marauder’s Map, and a gallery of photos from the real scavenger hunt showing the Map in action. This gallery has a few puzzle spoilers, so save it until you’re done playing, but make sure you look through it. The actual physical Map looks gorgeous, and it’s clear how much love and care the author put into this scavenger hunt for his daughter. It’s a reminder that this is a very personal game.
The Last Christmas Present is a little clumsy as a text adventure and you have to be prepared to put up with some guess-the-verb issues. But it’s earnest and sweet and an honest labour of love.