Pumpkin Head

Intro

"Pumpkin Head" was developed by 1550 using RPG Maker VX Ace and was an entry in the Retromania event. An event that was held to celebrate RMN's 10th birthday by giving people ten days to make a game that feels retro in terms of gameplay, sound, graphics, or plot. So there was a lot of apparent leeway in this event for entries.

Story

The story of "Pumpkin Head" is rather abstract and largely told through visuals. As such, the story can kind of fly over the player's head if their as tired as I was when I played this game. Though, I suppose experiencing this beast as some sort of surreal experience works as well. About the only story relevant things that happen that are relatively straight-forward is that between levels the player is confronted with various questions and your answers will decide which of the three endings you'll get.



And while some of the questions probably have hidden depths. Some of them are just weird to the point of being impossible to understand why they would be relevant to the player's ultimate fate.



I suppose some of the questions could have little impact on the ending or maybe I'm not thinking enough about the implications of the answer. I suppose one could argue that the answer here reflects one's desires for the future, one's willingness to embrace the now and stick with the status quo, and a desire to go back to the good old days. Even if those days really weren't as good as some people think they were. And others would argue I'm putting where my thought into this than the game deserves.

Gameplay

You run around collecting pumpkins while avoiding ghosts that will steal one or more pumpkins from you if they touch you. In fact, the ghosts in some of the later stages are so annoying you'll probably hang around the starting area in order pickup pumpkins as they respawn in a bid to make avoiding the ghosts as easy as possible. Especially since the ghosts tend to get new tricks as you advance through this game with some of them spawning in and out of existence in order to catch the player by surprise.

After you've collected enough pumpkins you'll need to interact with a patch of dirt twice in order to advance to the next level. Your first interaction will spawn a ladder while your second interaction will allow you to climb it.

Graphics and Sound

As you advance through the game the sound and graphics in this game just get creepier and creepier with the player in some of the later stages clearly taken pumpkins from other pumpkin heads that had failed to reach the end of this game for one reason or another. As you can imagine this is rather grisly if you think about it since your effectively walking around and decapitating corpses like some sort of psychopath. At any rate the game definitely has a visual flare but some of the concepts here may have been more appropriate for a Halloween game.

Conclusion

I'm not sure how to rate "Pumpkin Head" since the game is highly abstract. So much so that the story is hard to read for someone who usually plays games on the verge of passing out in my chair. At any rate the game is so weird it's probably worth playing just once in order to ask yourself what the bleed did I just play.