Santa’s Xmas Adventure is a sliding-tile puzzler. Gameplay-wise, it’s like a videogame version of those little plastic puzzles where you have to rearrange tiles to create a picture. Except the stakes are so much higher. You’re not just making a …
Santa’s Xmas Adventure is a sliding-tile puzzler. Gameplay-wise, it’s like a videogame version of those little plastic puzzles where you have to rearrange tiles to create a picture.
Except the stakes are so much higher. You’re not just making a picture in Santa’s Xmas Adventure. You’re saving Christmas. No pressure!
It may look like a simple stocking-filler, but Santa’s Xmas Adventure is a substantial puzzle game, with a massive 720 levels to solve, divided into three modes of 240 stages each.
This guide will give you a basic overview of each mode. We can’t help you solve the puzzles themselves – only your pulsating human brain can do that – but we’ll equip you with an understanding of how each mode works.
In Gift Mode, you’ve got two goals. The primary goal is to help Santa reach the exit. The secondary goal is to collect gifts.
You’re presented with a grid of tiles, with a few empty spaces so that you’ve got somewhere to slide them. On most of these tiles there’s a section of path. These sections can be horizontal, vertical, or turning at 90 degrees in any direction.
To allow Santa to move freely from his starting place to the checkered flag you need to arrange these tiles so that there’s a continuous pathway for him to follow. The challenge is that you’ve got limited room to maneuver. Unless you slide your tiles in the right order, you’re going to tie yourself in knots.
Even so, with enough experimentation you’ll eventually find a way to construct a viable path – but not necessarily an optimal one. This is where the gifts come in.
Each stage contains three gifts, sitting on three of the tiles. To ace a stage you not only need to create a path, but create a path using the three tiles with gifts on them, which is much easier said than done in some levels.
Once you’ve collected 100 gifts, you unlock…
The gameplay in Classic Mode is similar to the gameplay in Gift Mode. In fact, at first glance it looks simpler, since there are no gifts to try and incorporate into your pathways. But that’s because you’re being judged on even more exacting criteria.
Each stage in Classic Mode gives you a target number of moves to work to, which pretty much rules out experimentation, and encourages you instead to solve puzzles in your head before making a move.
While you can still finish a stage if you exceed the target move number, you’ll win fewer gifts. And you’ll be rightly ashamed.
Moving Mode is the most novel feature of the game. In Classic and Gift modes, Santa doesn’t set off towards the finish line until you’re done creating a path. In Moving Mode, he sets off as soon as there’s a path tile in front of him – even if it leads nowhere, or straight into the icy water.
That means Moving Mode is the only mode that lets you kill Santa. Just think on that for a moment.
To avert this catastrophe, you need to slide tiles around while Santa is marching cheerfully towards danger. In some cases you have to move the actual tile that Santa is walking on. In others, you have to take a tile that Santa has already traversed and use it to create a section of his onward path.
It’s tough, but fortunately the game gives you an allowance of ten tips to use in all three of its modes. These regenerate over time, so all you have to do if you run out is wait a while.
That’s the gameplay covered, so we’ll finish with a few words on the controls. In all three modes, the default control method is to select a tile with your cursor, tap A, and then use L stick or the control pad to move it horizontally or vertically.
However, there’s a second control method that lets you move the cursor by tilting your console or controller. We can’t say we recommend this method, but there’s nothing wrong with a bit of variety.
And that’s it. With this brief guide you should be able to get Santa back on his sleigh in no time.
Check out the game now by clicking here. Ho ho ho!
