Cookie Clicker's Christmas update adds festive cheer, test tube Santa

The deliciously addictive Cookie Clicker has just received a Christmas update, and as you may have been expecting you're going to have to do a hell of a lot of clicking to see everything it has to offer. If you've not played Cookie Clicker: I'm sorry, I'm so, so sorry, but the rest of your day is kind of a write-off.

I've played a lot of these semi-automated clicking games over the last few months, and I think Cookie Clicker might be the highlight, boasting a lovely, witty visual interface that heightens the weird thrill of watching a number go up. This seasonal update adds a strange grow-your-own Santa element, plus a ton of fun novelty items like Christmas hats, reindeer and lumps of coal. As ever, the goal of the game remains the same: to build a cookie empire, something that will eventually see you opening a portal to the underworld, creating a time machine, and transmuting one of the fundamental elements of the universe into delicious disc-shaped baked goods.

(Thanks, Kotaku .)

Tom Sykes

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.