I was up until 7 am playing Tarkov in a Santa costume and no I won't change

As work has settled back into its natural rhythm, I've settled back into the cycle of digital death and rebirth, digging into Escape From Tarkov - still, less committed than I've been in previous wipes - while also putting a few hours into Smite 2 and a couple of other games that are shooty but heavily embargoed. Sorry to be a tease, but it'll become clear over time.

Last week saw the festive events stop for many games, including Tarkov's Khorovod event. I knew early on that I wouldn't make my way through the full selection of quests as Tarkov's special events require a fairly hefty time commitment to get through. But I did want to complete the Christmas Dinner quest, which requires handing over stacks of food items in exchange for a hefty reward of XP, money and rare AK parts for customisation.

Handing that quest in at midnight, I was given access to another, Holiday Beyond the Means. The quest was simple: kill ten players while dressed as Santa Claus. The reward felt improbable: two graphics cards and three USB drives, expensive and rare items that are needed for quests and a real prick. 

The problem? The quest—and those sweet rewards— would vanish forever in 9 hours.

I've written before about how much I hate it when shooters make me do stupid things, and Escape From Tarkov is the worst offender as far as I'm concerned. Hell, killing these ten people dressed as Santa felt more like an antidote to scuffling through busted PCs in a warzone looking for graphics cards to keep the cruel taskmaster who was handing out these quests happy. Kills in Tarkov aren't difficult to come by, and I could use any gear I wanted so long as I was also wearing Santa's trademark hat and a fluffy white beard. It seemed silly not to get the ten kills. 

Yes, there was the small fact that it was bedtime already, and I wouldn't usually wake up until 8 am, just an hour before the servers got reset to take the quests offline. But what if I did it before I went to bed?

Now, look. I'm a 35-year-old man and I don't think the best use of anyone's sleeping hours is tooling around to do seasonal quests in a game that fully resets everyone's progress every six months. But that is nonetheless what I did, strapping a beard to my face, pulling my hat down low and heading to Factory, the smallest map in the game and the usual go-to for quickly repeatably high-risk, low-reward matches where you stomp around looking for player kills.

I wasn't stressed. I figured it would only take an hour. I was wrong. I was incredibly wrong.

Factory is a weird beast. There are a few different crowds in each raid: players trying to get kills with pistols, a handful of players trying to get kills with bolt action rifles within 25 metres and then some more geared-up guys trying to get kills with M4s, skulking around the basement with shotguns or just charging around getting kills for the hell of it. This means the map itself is a melting pot of different gear sets, an ecosystem of sorts where you can usually get your quests done. 

When I dropped in, everyone in the world had only Holiday Between The Means on their mind. Factory was like a Santa convention gone homicidal, wall to wall with high-tier armour and lethal firearms. My first kill was one of the biggest boys I've ever seen. You can tell when someone with really heavy gear is running towards you in Escape From Tarkov. The footsteps are heavier, you'll hear heavy breathing. 

In this case, the ground was shaking. I pulled a pin from my impact grenade and braced myself as the PMC rushed me from spawn. My first grenade hit the wall next to him. He was still standing and I'd only planned as far as tossing the grenade. 

"You rat," he screamed in voice chat as we danced around each other. I'd ambushed him but my 9mm pistol wasn't cutting it against his nearly full armour. He was pissing blood and in a panic, M4 chattering in his hands as he traced outlines of me on the walls. I danced forwards, he danced back, and I heard him start to reload. I didn't fancy my chances of killing him with another mag of pistol ammo, but I did have another grenade. 

The second grenade killed him instantly after screams of pain. This was one of the easiest kills I'd get in an ordeal that lasted seven hours, letting me finish up at 7 am just in time to take a shower and start my workday. 

Throughout the 25 raids that got me the next 9 kills I learnt a whole lot.

The first thing I've noticed is that wearing a Christmas hat makes your head very visible. The second thing is that wearing a Christmas hat offers absolutely no protection against bullets and shrapnel. You can be dressed like a tank beneath the chin, but everyone trying to do this quest has one big glowing weak spot, yourself included. 

Most fights in factory are at arms-length with fully automatic military-grade firepower so it becomes hard to survive them with any regularity when any bullet about the neck is likely to be an instant kill. This lack of predictability is pretty tilting, but it just means you have to lean into the chaos. This meant firefights in the staircases, a particularly grim knife fight while a teenager yelled for mercy as they swung their assault rifle left and right to try and target me as I stabbed them repeatedly in the legs and even a surprise double kill that wrapped up my quest when I'd pretty much lost all hope.

I'd like to say it taught me never to pull an all-nighter to do a limited-time quest in a game, but I suspect that's not a lesson I'm going to learn. 

Gibs

• Mohrta looks good. I put it in December's PC Gaming Show Most Wanted, but glad to see Rock Paper Shotgun take a swing at it. 
• The games industry is continuing to eat itself. You can see the slide deck here but i'd take it with a pinch of salt. Frankly, things are tough in games at the moment with spending and investment down, and this spreadsheet digs into a lot of the purported reasons why. 
• Elon Musk has been paying someone to boost his PoE and Diablo 4 characters and now everyone's okay with this. I try to keep my political leanings out of the newsletter because while I'm pretty rabidly left-leaning it seems silly to bang on about it all the time. However, I'm absolutely going to take the piss out of Elon Musk bragging about how good he is at Diablo and PoE2 when it turns out he's been paying someone else to be good for him. I've been playing games for a long time, and taking credit for things someone else has done on your account is no better than paying for gold or account boosting, both of which are anathema to serious competition. You just know Musk would pay for hacks in a shooter. 
• I'm still deep in summery pop tunes despite the fact it's cold as hell. Flowerovlove's Boys is great and not dissimilar from Charli XCX's tune that's… also called Boys.