Video Game Review: Pumpkin Jack

Developer: Nicolas Meyssonnier

Publisher: Headup and Beep Japan

Genre: 3D Platformer

Platform: PlayStation 5

Nostalgia, as I have said time and again, is a tricky beast. While it’s not necessarily a bad thing to indulge in, far too many things that try to evoke it go too far and end up creating a game (or movie or book or television show) that banks almost entirely on nostalgia to draw an audience to the exclusion of anything else of value. It’s one of my biggest pet peeves in this modern era where pop culture is obsessed with itself and the “glory days” of twenty to thirty years ago, which is why I’m pleased to report that Pumpkin Jack successfully evokes the feeling of classic platformers without lacking an identity of its own, even if that identity really only sticks out from the crowd by way of its aesthetic.

The Basics: Pumpkin Jack is a 3D platformer about a legendary trickster being sent back to Earth after his demise so he can help Satan stop a wizard trying to break Satan’s curse of a horde of monsters plaguing humanity. As you might expect of a protagonist working eagerly and more-or-less willingly for the literal devil, Jack is abrasive, callous, and just generally nasty. There’s a certain charm to how mean he is to the other characters in the brief dialogues throughout the game’s six levels, but it wears off somewhat once the pattern of Jack insulting and threatening everyone becomes established and then never really deviated from. Still, it doesn’t get the chance to completely wear out its welcome, and playing as a complete jerk with a pumpkin for a head beating up ghouls in graveyards and such in this spookiest of months is a decent source of amusement.

The level design is very linear with very little to do besides the main objective. Each level has 20 crow skulls and 1 gramophone to collect scattered throughout them, but they’re never hidden very far from the main path and always easy to find, so it’s unlikely you’ll have to play through more than once to achieve full completion. The skulls can be used to buy alternate costumes for Jack which, while fun, could have been a bit more interesting even if only through the inclusion of hats. I can’t help but feel that a cowboy outfit that doesn’t have a cowboy hat isn’t as good as it could be. The gramophones, meanwhile, show you a silly little dance scene once collected. Aside from visual differences, which are admittedly well-crafted, the levels have very little variation: You run and jump and fight your way past obstacles and enemies until you reach either an on-rails section (be it a minecart, horse ride, magic portal etc.) or brief puzzle where you play only as Jack’s disembodied pumpkin head and repeating until you reach the level’s boss who will, upon their death, give you a new weapon to use from the next level onward.

I should clarify that I don’t think the simplicity of the gameplay is an actively bad thing, I just think there could’ve been a bit more to it. That said, what is there feels good. The platforming is smooth and responsive and the weapons are just fun and interesting enough that testing out a new one you get is exciting without making you feel like you’re moving on from the last one too quickly. The on-rails sections, despite how… well, on-rails they are feel remarkably satisfying, particularly in terms of the sense of fastness they manage to convey, and enemy encounters are just threatening enough that you’ll through most of them with a good chunk of your health taken out but deaths are still fairly infrequent.

I said before that Pumpkin Jack evokes a feeling of nostalgia without taking it too far, and a big part of that is the graphical design of the game. Everything has this sort of smooth texture to it that makes everything feel very retro while still being recognizably a modern game from 2020 (or, in the case of the PlayStation 5 release, 2021). Each level has its own aesthetic that sets it apart from the others without seeming like a different thing entirely, and all of them feel about as delightful as a Halloween-themed game can and should, not to mention that many of them use the good ol’ “rendering distance disguised as fog” trick to great effect. The music and sound design aren’t really anything special but they are perfectly – and I really can’t think of another adjective to describe the particular quality the score has – “Halloween-y” in the way of classic movies TV channels play all through October.

All in all, Pumpkin Jack is an amusing diversion to occupy you for a night or two around Halloween, but that’s about it. It’s not a very long game; I must’ve only spent about six or seven hours on it, and while the gameplay of those six or seven hours is good for what it is, there’s not much incentive to replay afterwards. It’s a fun romp but a fleeting one, almost like a flickering candle one might put in a hollowed-out gourd of some kind. While I can recommend playing it, I do so with the caveat that I wouldn’t say it’s worth the 30 dollar price point – but it will probably go on sale around Halloween on at least one digital storefront, so you might just be in luck.