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It must be so difficult to design a good game themed to a particular holiday. Get too specific, and it’ll only appeal in certain geographical regions to people who deck out their houses with every possible light-up inflatable snowman or twenty-foot Home Depot skeleton. But go too vague, and you risk begging the question of why the game even centers around that special day in the first place.
In 2016, Capcom took a big gamble and themed their fourth AAA Dead Rising game heavily around Christmas. Unfortunately, the game didn’t hit the same success level as prior installments. It was hurt in reviews by key design tweaks meant to make the game more accessible to more players, and hurt in sales by launching as an Xbox and Games for Windows exclusive for a full year at a time when the PS4 was mega-hot.
I’ve been one of the game’s largest apologists for years. Capcom didn’t pay or ask me to write this, and I bought the game with my own money. Dead Rising 4 sidestepped the deliberate almost rogue-like progression of the first few games and pivoted towards a more traditional open world action design, focused around bashing zombies in a mall with hundreds of different weapons and levelling up through a variety of systems. The third game struck a better balance between…
