Palkovil The Way Home

The goal is simple and the route to it is not: bring the Christmas tree home. Between you and it is a laboratory full of aliens who would rather the holiday did not happen, and they are the ones handing out the jobs you have to complete.

The laboratory runs as a corridor of numbered doors, and a poster beside each one shows the creature waiting behind it. That turns picking a door into a decision rather than a guess. An alien shopkeeper further down the corridor trades with you between jobs.

Toys are the currency of the tasks. Completing what the aliens ask earns them, and a full collection of souvenirs is what the game treats as real progress. There are pets to feed and bosses to get past along the way, so the quests vary rather than repeating one action.

The whole thing is wrapped in a festive setting — snow, lights, a New Year that needs saving. It is a quest game rather than a reflex one, so the difficulty is in working out what a room wants rather than in executing anything quickly.