A Bad Christmas Story

WARNING: This game contains flashing images. If you are sensitive to flashing lights, please proceed with caution.

A Bad Christmas Story is a short, horror interactive fiction experience set in the same universe as Bad Summer. Whether you’re already familiar with Bad Summer or stepping into this world for the first time, A Bad Christmas Story is a standalone, tightly focused horror story you can finish in one sitting.

Welcome to New Empress City

Another dead body, another day in New Empress. For the crowd, it’s just another story for the evening news in a city that’s long since gone numb. Death is commonplace on these streets, and the police is stretched thin. Experience a gritty, dark setting where every fresh corpse is just another file stamped, shelved, and quietly forgotten.

Play as Detective Oliver Smith

Step into the shoes of New Empress’s youngest detective. Oliver is intelligent, stubborn, and far too used to spending his holidays staring at corpses. Your choices and investigations shape his drive to find the truth, and how high a price he pays for it.

Cinematic Storybook

Experience a Christmas horror tale told through dark, storybook-style imagery and film-inspired angles. Slow pans and stylized hand-drawn animations turn each moment into a dark, eerie moving picture that sticks with you long after the credits roll.

Choices Matter

Details come back to haunt you. Information picked up early in the night can unlock smarter choices, sharper questions, and safer outcomes later on. Miss those details, and you’ll be left guessing when it matters most. is built to be finished in a single evening, with meaningful choices worth revisiting to see how else this night could have gone.