[COLUMN] We Need More Seasonal Holiday Games | by Marty Sliva (Patreon)

I’m a sucker for holidays, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve adored the ritual, reflection, celebration, nostalgia, community, and pageantry that comes with them. If Target moves all of their shit around and creates a dedicated aisle in the weeks leading up to it, you best believe I’m there.

For me, holidays and their respective seasons act like cultural mile-markers on our own personal annual road trips. I love the culture that forms around these occasions. What we eat and drink reflects the seasons and their holidays, from summer cookouts to hot toddies on a cold winter night. The vibes that come with a year’s first beach day or the first chill of sweater weather have their own unique texture. Movies like Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, Moonrise Kingdom, Halloween, Home Alone, Elf, It’s a Wonderful Life, and Die Hard (yes, Darren is correct) have a perfect time of the year to be rewatched.

These seasons and unique days are more than just pages and squares on a calendar; they’re a way of centering ourselves in a given moment. Which is why it’s strange to me that video games seem to be lacking a dedicated celebratory sub-genre. The kinds of games that we communally revisit at very specific times of year to tap into that annual zeitgeist. We don’t have a video game holiday canon. So let’s try and fix that.

A few things already exist that can help us. At a base level, most 2D and 3D mascot platformers contain some levels themed after a very specific time of year. Rare was particularly good at this in their Donkey Kong Country trilogy on the SNES, but they really perfected it in Banjo-Kazooie. There’s Gobi’s Desert for the summer, Mad Monster Mansion for the fall, and Freezeezy Peak for the winter. And then the final proper level, Click Clock Woods, has you exploring a singular space and solving puzzles through each of the four seasons. Rare clearly understood the assignment decades before I did.

Live service games like Pokemon Go, Fortnite, and Destiny celebrate the seasons, but those only really cater to folks who are already heavily invested in those games as a part-time job, so it doesn’t help the rest of us. There are also annual sports games, but I feel like actually watching or playing football in the fall and baseball in the summer are better ways of tapping into that feeling.

With that said, I love a game that runs the gamut of an entire year, whether it’s using our real calendar or not. I adore watching my little town change throughout each season in Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley. And the academia-centric nature of games like Bully and the modern Persona series leans into the seasons – I particularly love the small details in Persona 5 Royal, like visiting Shibuya around Halloween and seeing NPCs dressed up and stores decorated for the occasion.

That said, I’ve always wanted the technology to be able to stitch together different levels and segments from different games into one streamlined experience. Like how you can watch a compilation of scenes on YouTube or listen to an artist’s greatest hits album, the idea of building a literal playlist of game moments that revolve around a single theme would be lovely. It’d be like WarioWare, just lousy with copyright infringement. But until that time comes, we’ll work with what we have.

Let’s start at the beginning of the year, in the doldrums of winter (apologies to readers in the southern hemisphere for my extremely American/Wisconsin-centric view on these seasons and holidays). Pairing frigid temps and a few feet of snow with a similar game can take you down a few different routes, many of which involve surviving the elements or fending off hordes of tundra ghouls. There are plenty of games that fit this criteria, such as The Long Dark, the Lost Planet trilogy, Dead Space 3, Until Dawn, and the Frozen Wilds expansion for Horizon Zero Dawn.

There’s also plenty of individual areas in specific games that do winter vibes extremely well – the snowy mountain regions of Red Dead Redemption 2, the Painted World of Ariamis in Dark Souls, and any frozen tundra of any Zelda game. I’ve previously written about my favorite dungeon in Twilight Princess, and it’s an absolute gem of a winter area.

But I have two picks to enter the seasonal game canon, the first being Simogo’s Year Walk. The 2014 puzzle adventure game is a bleak, spooky, and evocative journey through Swedish folklore, and a perfect game to play bundled up on a snowy night. And the second game is the original Metal Gear Solid, which is set in the Alaskan archipelago of Shadow Moses, and still might be my favorite depiction of winter in games. Footprints in the snow, the condensation of breath in the air, and some A+ wolfdogs all make for a perfect annual winter replay.

But while winter is still in full effect throughout February, Valentine’s Day provides a brief respite from the cold. When I think of relationships in games, my mind drifts to any of the dozens of games with romancable companions. But more specifically, I think of games that tend to deal with the more complicated and tragic side of love. For that, we have the likes of Catherine, Doki Doki Literature Club!, One Night Stand, and Florence.

Once Valentine’s Day is in your rear-view mirror, the next major milestone is spring, and three games immediately come to mind to be inducted into the seasonal canon, each of which revolves around the idea of nature blossoming and a return of life after a prolonged absence.

Thatgamecompany’s Flower, their predecessor to Journey, puts you in control of a natural wind that gathers flower petals and breathes life into a world that humans are slowly encroaching upon. Likewise, the gameplay loop of Nintendo’s Pikmin series – harvesting an ever-growing army of cute little critters to help you clear gardens of unwanted pests – always feels like getting your yard in order after the final thaw of the season. And 2006’s Okami similarly has your avatar of the Shinto sun goddess Amaterasu cleansing the world of a demonic plague using her celestial brush. It’s also secretly the best traditional 3D Zelda game ever, but that’s a conversation for another time.

Of course, any farming game from Harvest Moon to the glut of modern cozy indie hits also tap into this feeling of nature coming back to life, but given how so many of them revolve around that aforementioned full calendar year, they work as a broad look at every season.

And with the flowers in full bloom and the weather warming up, it’s time to move onto summer, which might be the season with the best representation in the medium. So many games excel at tapping into that sub-baked feeling of going wherever the summer breeze might take you. Traveling from island to island as you sail the seas in The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker and Chrono Cross delivers a tangible sense of seasonal adventure. Meanwhile, Inaba during the summer months of Persona 4 Golden conveys that sense of stagnant heat alongside the hum of cicadas that paints one of my favorite portraits of an endless summer this side of Neon Genesis Evangelion.

But when I think of summer, the first game that comes to mind is Super Mario Sunshine. And while Sunshine is certainly not the best 3D Mario game (shout out to Bowser’s Fury), it might have the best vibes of any game in the series, and the interconnected nature of Isle Delfino lends the GameCube classic an excellent sense of place. I really adored the first 10 hours of my recent replay on stream, and even though I put the controller down and amicably parted ways after a string of particularly frustrating deaths, my memories of the game are almost universally positive.

If you want to enjoy some actual sunshine, there’s Konami’s Boktai: The Sun is in Your Hand for the Game Boy Advance. Produced by Hideo Kojima, you play as a vampire hunter named Django who wields a gun powered by genuine real-life sunlight gathered by a photometric sensor on the game’s cartridge. It’s strange, janky, and the GBA screen was almost impossible to see in direct sunlight, but damn if that’s not such a cool gimmick that leans into something only games are capable of.

And finally, there are a few games that capture the essence of a childhood summer vacation in fantastic ways, first being A Short Hike, 2019’s incredible bite-sized exploration game from Adam Robinson-Yu. A Short Hike distills the thrill of exploration found in Breath of the Wild into a tight two-hour jaunt around a dense little island. It’s one of those perfect single-sitting games that I’ve gone back to on a yearly basis since first playing it.

The other game that bottles summer vacation up in its purest form is the Boku no Natsuyasumi series, which fittingly translates to “My Summer Vacation.” The cult classic taps into the slice-of-life drama of being a kid and spending your summer out in the country. Fishing, collecting bugs, bothering the locals, and just soaking in the incredible pre-rendered and hand-painted backgrounds make it one of those games that you just want to let envelop you. Seriously, I could scroll through this gallery for hours.

While the series has never officially made its way to the US, you might know it from the absolutely-worth-your-time-despite-being-6-hours-long Action Button video essay, or the pair of spin-offs in 2013’s Attack of the Friday Monsters! on Nintendo 3DS and 2022’s Shin chan: Me and the Professor on Summer Vacation The Endless Seven-Day Journey. But in wonderful news, Boku No Natsuyasumi 2 for the PS2 just recently received an English translation patch from the incredible Hilltop, who specializes in translating and localizing Japan-only games. I’ll let you figure out how to play it, but I’ve dug Hilltop’s work so much on translating games like this, Racing Lagoon, and Dr. Slump that I support him on Patreon.

As summer begins to wane we look forward to autumn, which can be a tricky one because it feels like it has two distinct phases – the leadup to Halloween, and then the four-week dash to Thanksgiving (again, apologies for my extremely American/Wisconsin-centric view).

For Halloween, it’s easy to just pop in any survival horror game to capture the tone of the season. I just did a full replay of Silent Hill 1-4 in October on stream, and it was a fantastic companion to my usual horror movie rewatches. You could do that with any number of horror franchises – Resident Evil, Fatal Frame, Siren, Amnesia. But for something a bit more specific, Double Fine’s Costume Quest 1 and 2 are not the best (only?) trick-or-treating games ever made, but they’re also a pair of excellent, bite-sized RPGs that marry the mechanics of SNES classics with the wit and charm that you’d expect from DF. Highly recommended.

But once Halloween is over, we enter November and what I like to call the orange zone. It’s all about autumnal colors, the crunch of leaves beneath your feet, and a nice crispness in the air. Though not fully dedicated to the season, certain segments of The Last of Us, Alan Wake, Night in the Woods, Firewatch, and The Witness all capture this feeling nicely. And the golden leaves of the Erd Tree in Elden Ring, particularly around the Altus Plateau, make for some excellent autumn vibes.

With fall behind us, the last stop we have is the final push at the end of the year with Christmas and New Year’s Eve. There’s the sneakily-good Devil May Cry-inspired The Nightmare Before Christma: Oogie's Revenge for PS2 and Xbox, while Square Enix delivered a nice little dose of Christmas spirit in the Jack Skelington-themed level in Kingdom Hearts 2. And speaking of Square, the original Parasite Eve on PS1 is set in an excellent take on New York City during a cold and wet holiday season, along with some A+ body horror to go with it. Also, it’d be cool if Square Enix released Parasite Eve on modern platforms in 2024, please and thank you.

The bizarre and wonderful Christmas NIGHTS into Dreams paved the way for games like Dead Rising 4 and Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales to take their respective franchise formulas and wrap them in a nice layer of holiday cheer. And South Park 64 lets you piss on snowballs and toss them as grenades, and if that doesn’t put you in the Christmas spirit, I don’t know what will.

As for New Year’s Eve, I always view those final hours of the year as a time to simultaneously look back and reflect on the past 52 weeks, while also looking forward to what the next 52 might have in store. This symmetry shares something in common with time-loop games, be it the recent In Stars and Time, Outer Wilds, or The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. Hell, every New Year’s Eve might as well start with a Majora’s Mask “Dawn of the Final Day” title card.

And with that, we’ve reached the end of the year. While I don’t think this trip down memory lane actually solved our seasonal holiday video game canon crisis, it’s impressive to see the breadth of games that tap into these specific moments in time. And while they might not be as curated or immediately accessible as our traditions across other mediums or forms of culture, it’s clear that there’s a game for any and all seasons. You just might have to dig for it.