Xmas Carnage

Playing as a vengeful Easter Bunny taking an axe to Santa Claus sounds like a great premise for an MS-DOS action game, but Xmas Carnage settles for being a confusing, maze-filled shooter built for a 1994 German trade show.

What happens when the Easter Bunny loses his mind in Xmas Carnage

You boot the game up, expect a quick palette cleanser after playing mainstream early 90s shooters, and immediately hear a chirpy rendition of holiday music chiming through your Sound Blaster synth. Then you spawn in a snowy yard with a hatchet in your hand and a bleeding snowman firing lasers at your head. That is the initial hook of Xmas Carnage, a first-person shooter made by Soft Enterprises GmbH for the Computer '94 trade show in Cologne.

The core premise flips the holiday calendar upside down: you are the Easter Bunny, you despise Santa Claus, and your entire mission is to slaughter Father Christmas and his helpers at the North Pole. Instead of standard soldiers or demons, your targets include teleporting elves, floating angels, lab technicians in Santa hats, and heavily armed Santas wearing trenchcoats with shotguns hidden underneath. It is a wildly weird setup, but the actual moment-to-moment combat is remarkably blunt. You start with a melee axe that swings at a glacial pace and does almost no damage, forcing you to sprint around looking for proper firepower before an angel snipes you from across the map.

The VR-6 engine turns the North Pole into an endless labyrinth

Soft Enterprises built the game using their internal VR-6 3D Engine, the same technology behind their earlier title The Hidden Below. Visually, it is an odd combination of digitized graphics, pre-rendered sprites, and crude MS Paint additions. Picking up a new weapon triggers a cheerful rendition of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer", which provides a surreal soundtrack while you spray rockets into crowds of trenchcoat Santas. However, all on-screen menu text and objective prompts are strictly in German, leaving non-German speakers to guess what the HUD elements mean.

The real issue with Xmas Carnage is level architecture. First-person shooters of 1994 often relied on keycards and mazes, but this game takes spatial disorientation to an extreme. You navigate outdoor snowfields filled with identical rows of buildings, eventually descending into pitch-black indoor zones built out of giant wall cubes. Even when bringing up the overhead map interface, finding the exit requires hugging every wall and blindly testing corridors. The layout issues turn combat into a game of hide-and-seek where you spend more time staring at geometry than shooting holiday monsters.

Why this oddity never made it to store shelves

If you were browsing software racks in the mid-90s, you never saw this box on a shelf. Soft Enterprises developed the title specifically for promotional distribution at the Cologne trade show, later offering it via mail order through their website. Because it skipped traditional retail channels, contemporary gaming magazines completely ignored it, leaving its legacy to retro computer fans and abandonware collectors years later.

Looking back, the game is more interesting as an obscure technical showcase for Soft Enterprises (who would go on to make Skout) than as a refined shooter. The novel theme wears thin once the navigational headaches set in, and the sluggish starting hatchet makes early levels a chore. Yet, for fans of obscure MS-DOS action games, there is an undeniably bizarre charm to running around identical snowbanks, blasting shotgun-wielding Santas to the tune of 8-bit Christmas carols.

Play Xmas Carnage online directly in your web browser

You do not need to hunt down old floppies or mess with old DOSBox configuration files to experience this trade-show oddity today. You can play Xmas Carnage free in your browser right here on this page with zero installation required. It is an obscure piece of mid-90s German PC history that is worth trying for ten minutes just to hear the holiday tunes play while playing an armed Easter Bunny.