Last night on Christmas Eve Eve, Epic rolled out a new legendary skin that miraculously hadn’t leaked yet, and it might be its best Christmas-themed creation yet.
The new skin is legendary tier, which will set you back a pretty penny at 2,000 V-bucks (about $20), but for many, myself included, it’s totally worth it. The skin is Krampus, the Christmas demon of storybook lore, and he shows up in Fortnite looking like a cross between The Grinch and Gene Simmons with a ludicrously long tongue.
Krampus is a half-goat, half-demon creature that is from central European folklore that might even be pre-Christian. Though he’s now best known for essentially being the anti-Santa Claus. While St. Nick gives presents to good children, Krampus punishes the bad ones by abducting, drowning and/or eating them. So uh, behave, I guess, is the lesson there.
Fortnite’s Krampus certainly has his goat features, and he’s wearing a sort of misshapen Santa suit himself. But it’s not just the skin that’s so appealing, it’s also his pickaxe, the Brat Catcher, and his glider, Krampus’ Little Helper, which is half of a demonic spectral goat-reindeer. Probably my favorite glider since the bat or ice dragon, honestly.
All of this will…cost you. If you want the legendary skin, the epic glider and the rare mining tool, that’s 4,000 V-bucks in all, which is about $40. Not a bad price for a last-minute Christmas present, I suppose, but it’s rather hefty.
I had never heard of Krampus until Dwight Schrute first brought up him and his child-stealing in The Office a while back, but he’s gotten even more popular since. There was an entire Krampus Christmas horror movie in 2015 that starred Adam Scott and Toni Collette that was better than it had any right to be. And more recently in Overwatch, Blizzard has come out with a Krampus skin for Junkrat, which was the best skin of its Winter Wonderland holiday event by far. But even that might not be as good as the Fortnite one here.
Krampus exemplifies just how Epic makes all this money from a totally free game. Some of their skins are just so badass or funny or well-designed that you feel like you almost have to buy them, and in this case, you’re spending $20-40, a third to two thirds of the price of a full $60 game, just for one small cosmetic set. The power of attractive design and peer pressure, I suppose.
Krampus will only be on sale for the next 24 hours for this first run, and while he could be back in a week, he could be back in a year and be the next Skull Trooper, you never know. I’m certainly not going to wait on him or his ghost goat reindeer. This entire package is just too great to pass up.
What will Christmas Eve itself bring to the store? I don’t know, but now I’m pretty damn excited to find out.
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