Evil Pumpkin: The Lost Halloween

I would have to give this game a provisional "thumb up" due to the difficulty. This is not a game for the casual player, the easily and not so easily frustrated, or anyone who does not take notes while they play. This is a very difficult game to play. (Reminds me of Deponia.) This game has some very obscure references and reading the dialogue is extremely important. (Skip dialogue at your own risk.) More importantly is remembering some absurd remark or off-topic thought of some character a chapter or two later. The clues are there, masked behind riddles that in some cases are very, very oblique, referenced in the boy's journal, various diary pages, or in some dialogue remark earlier in the game. I would like to thank Micheal who posted his playthrough in the community videos, they were very helpful. (Oddly enough he and I never got stuck in the same place. Note: Micheal's playthroughs are in German, but do not let that deter you. The playthroughs are easy enough to follow.) I would also like to thank those in the discussions threads, I found valuable clues and an answer or two. Storyline: The Boy (whose name is, by inferred references, Lautrec Van Hollow) steals/takes his father's book "Halloween" on October 30th. Being a clever little boy, he says so himself (and quite determined), he wants to find out what Halloween is and why Halloween is never celebrated in his town of Dern. To do this he needs to decypher the book, escape his room (I think he is grounded or it is past his bedtime) and go talk to adults who were around when Halloween existed. Just a note here: The game dialogue is rather snarky, full of off-kilter remarks, and is very absurd at times. I found most of the dialogue amusing, in a disbelieving type of way, since all the adults seem crazy until the end (and they are hiding a secret). Leave normal reasoning and logic at the door since having both will only deter your gameplay. An example of what I mean is this: The raven, whose name I inferred was Lester, wants a golden pipe, a newspaper, a pair of slippers, and a glass of wine for nightcap before he moves out of the boy's way. Absolutely illogical and utterly absurd, but rather funny too. The whole game plays like this, so be warned. Gameplay: Difficult, very difficult in places, but not impossible as some of the negative reviews claim. (I personally did not run into a game breaking glitch at the end and running in circles meant taking a break to clear my head.) As I said this game is difficult, and the logic obscure, at best. The easy parts: The Hidden Object scenes were fair and the objects not unfairly hidden. The items found in each scene basically match the area found, though littered with unusual items. I did not find the actual puzzles overly challenging, but they are brain twisters. The puzzle variety includes music, sliders, logic, recipe and picture puzzles. I would call the "knocking the sock down", "candle", and "lock picking" puzzles, mini-games. The "candle" and "lock picking" puzzles, my son, a player of FPSs and fast paced RPGs did both in about 15-20 seconds, first time, though I took much longer and required several tries. The point is, both are doable with patience and speed, respectively. I only had trouble with one puzzle, and not the "candle" or "torch" puzzles so many have issue with. (The torch puzzle actually made sense to me, and I did it first try.) My trouble puzzle was the gate puzzle going into pumpkin-head town between chapter 4 and 5. The riddle on the gate makes no sense as most riddles in this game seem to do. It really is not nonsense, just extremely oblique. Once I knew the answer it made perfect sense afterwards (even the riddle). The hard parts: The point and click gameplay is uneven. Some of it is very easy, other parts are very difficult. I think some of the difficulty comes from the size of some objects needed to be found. (The thimble on the train set comes to mind. It is very small.) I hunted and hunted for what needed to be done in that scene and found the thimble by accident. (Oh by the way the cursor does change into a little octopus so careful searching of the entire screen is needed quite often.) The other difficult part of the point and click scenerios is just the flat out oblique logic used and odd use of items (the golf club once totally disassembled comes to mind). The logic of this game really reminds me of Deponia: strange, weird, and HUH? Also the game inhibits the player from moving ahead in the story before the present tasks are completed or gaining items too soon in the story. A good example of this is the guitar string in the toy shop. A player may 'twang' the string early in the game but can not take it until later in the game when needed. I can only presume the string's 'twang' is a subtle auditory reminder that the string is there and will be needed later. On a more even note: the boy uses a gizbelt, a clever invention of his. The gizbelt carries his gizstruments which by the end of the game include a pairs of scissors, a hatchet, a slingshot, and a pencil. These gizstruments upgrade (or down grades in the case of the pencil) through gameplay as they are used and the pair of scissors that could barely cut paper at the beginning of the game can cut through metal chain by the end. So if the gamer knows they need to cut something and can not do it wait until the scissors upgrade then try it again. These items are used to do certain things and should not be overlooked when needing to do something like cut, break or retrieve things though the gamer might have to wait for the upgrade. There is a fast travel map once the gamer leaves home and the map is completed. The first chapter takes place at the boy's home which includes 2 upstairs rooms and hallway, the main entrance (called lobby), the basement, the front of the house, the front yard, and the fountain. (No map). There are six chapters in this game. Up until Chapter 6 the game play is linear and the gamer can not move forward until every task is completed for that chapter, and there is no going back. Chapter 6 goes everywhere but once all the tasks are completed in an area, the areas close off. The map will show with "an exclamation mark" if something needs to be done. Using the hint button I would say is a must, if the gamer does not use the map. It will at least get the gamer to the place something needs to found or something needs to be done. The hint button can be refilled by looking for little bats in scenes. A word about candy, in this game the gamer can collect various types of candy found lying around on the floor, on shelves or stuck to furniture or buildings. The only thing candy is good for is buying Halloween items from the store and decorating the Van Hallow back yard. This has nothing to do with the game so do not fret about missed candy pieces. It is just something fun to do if so inclined. In conclusion, despite the game's difficulty level and lack of normal logic, I found this game much more enjoyable to play on a replay then the first frustrating and hair pulling time though.

It's rare that a game so thoroughly defeats me in the way Evil Pumpkin did. It's not that I wasn't able to finish the game - a slowly-recharging hint meter and the extremely helpful denizens of YouTube ensured I would be able to brute-force my way through the trickier sections. No, Evil Pumpkin foiled me by forcing me to resort to hints over and over again. A well-designed adventure game - and make no mistake, this is more of an adventure game than a HOG, to the point that the hidden object screens are actually optional - moves players through the story in a logical fashion, presenting them with obstacles to overcome and giving them fair clues and tools to allow them to struggle their way through. Evil Pumpkin goes a different way entirely, loading itself up with nonsensical, sometimes buggy, puzzles and some of the least impressive HOGs in recent memory. On to the HOG criteria! Criteria 1: To what degree do the puzzle screens look like a thrift store vomited on my monitor? It's pretty bad. While the game does a passable job of restricting its searches to areas that would logically be cluttered, many of those areas are littered with items which make no sense given the setting - and that's just in the logical areas. There are also plenty of screens where a load of nonsense is tossed in. A church pew? Seems like a good place for a gold bar, straight razor, bullet and tree! It's just a mess for mess' sake. And that's not even getting into the rampant cheating that goes into item placement. There isn't much size cheating - the game has a good grasp of perspective, at least. That doesn't stop it from defying gravity, changing colours, and going transparent whenever it suits the developers' purposes. Just shoddy work here. Criteria 2: Are the searches justified by the premise/story? Only in the most cursory fashion. There are the standard 12:1 item finding sequences, but beyond that, no justification is given for the searches. This is largely because the game is far more interested in its puzzles than its searches - on the 'difficulty select' menu, HOSs only appear as an element on the lowest difficulty setting, aimed at 'casual' players'. This suggests that serious adventure gamers wouldn't bother with hidden object searches, and should focus on the game's other, more nonsensical puzzles. Given this attitude towards the genre they're working in, it's no surprise that the game's hidden object screens are so lacking. Criteria 3: How well do the various puzzles and object searches meld together to form a coherent whole? Not well at all. The story follows a little boy on a journey to find out why his town is the only place in the world without a Halloween. It's not a bad premise, but his method of investigation never makes much sense, and the conclusion he comes to seems utterly random. This isn't helped at all by the game's terrible puzzles, which range from annoying to buggy. This isn't just a case of my distaste for sliding block puzzles rearing its ugly head once more. There's the equivalent of a jigsaw puzzle with pieces that don't fit together and offer no clue as to where they're to be placed on the board. There's an 'eliminate the subjects' game whose rules are so oblique that I could see people being driven mad. Then there's a puzzle which is just plain wrong - as in the developers forgot their own world's rules when crafting it, so the answer doesn't make any logical sense. With its lacklustre HOSs, frustrating puzzles, and hint/skip meter which takes forever to charge, Evil Pumpkin: The Lost Halloween is a disaster on every level. Literally the only thing that the game has going for it is a wry wit that surfaces in a bevy of puns offered for nearly every circumstance. For anyone uninterested in wordplay or adorable talking animals, this game offers nothing to recommend.

This was the most annoying P&C/HOG I ever played. The crappy translation and illogical puzzles will often lead you to a wrong solution, leaving you stuck. Poor voice acting and storytelling do not improve the game experience for sure. Avoid this product if you can.

29.5.2020. Game #127 [h1] I bought this game to support my country. I regret it [/h1] Evil Pumpkin: The Lost Halloween might be remember on Steam for one thing and one thing only. It was the first video game ever to be released on Steam by Serbs. Being an effing Serb myself, I felt like it was my civil duty to buy this game (on sale) and support the developers. I tried hard to like this game but I just couldn’t. [h1] The sad truth about Hidden Object Puzzle Adventure (HOPA) games [/h1] While our neighbors in the north-west are making games like Serious Sam https://store.steampowered.com/app/41000/Serious_Sam_HD_The_First_Encounter/ and The Talos Principle https://store.steampowered.com/app/257510/The_Talos_Principle/, us Serbs here are mostly stuck making, almost exclusively, HOPA games. Hopa games are an interesting breed of games. They mostly consist of really detailed still images, some texts and very light puzzle solving. I actually really like HOPA games. They can be a lot of fun. Not only are they relaxing to play but you can also give your brain a nice workout and even improve your vocabulary while searching for that one hidden item. The problem is that… HOPA games are massively produced. Before Steam opened the floodgates of Greenlight and Direct it didn’t really have a lot of HOPA games. I’m not saying that HOPA games shouldn’t be on Steam but, if I was in the mood for a HOPA game, Steam wouldn’t be the first place to look for one. Websites like BigFishGames are the main publishers/distributors of these games and they have so many of them. Not only that, but most HOPA games seem take place in a spooky mansion with eerie music and other generic creepy themes. [h1] The story about a boy who cares too much for Halloween [/h1] The story in this game starts with a little boy reading a stolen Halloween book that tells the “Actual” story of Halloween. As he reads this book, a talking owl appears and persuades him to figure out the actual truth behind Halloween and its origins. Seeing how the boy doesn’t have anything better to do, he sets out on a journey to escape his house and figure things out. [h1] All HOPA games play this way [/h1] The gameplay of this game, and all other hopa games, consists of you going through rooms, solving puzzles, collecting items and, most importantly, looking for hidden objects. While item collecting and exploring rooms is nothing unusual, looking for hidden objects is where the meat of HOPA games really is. Most rooms in this game consist of still beautifully drawn images with a lot of attention to detail. Whenever you see something unusual, out of place and sparkly, you should click on it. More often than not, you will click on a sparkly place and be sent to a window with a messed up pile of junk, but don’t be disgusted, because that’s what these games are about. You are supposed to find a list of items in this pile of junk and after you finish the list, you will be awarded with an item which will help you progress, at least, that’s the idea. The object is usually a key, a piece of a mechanism or something similar. [h1] Evil Pumpkin: The Lost Halloween wants to be MORE than just another HOPA game [/h1] Like I mentioned above, most HOPA games are the same and it’s really hard to tell them apart. Publishers of HOPA games don’t want too much straying from the regular formula, not even when it comes to the theme. Thus, Evil Pumpkin: The Lost Halloween also falls in the category of still images, spooky atmosphere and a few puzzles. BUT BUT BUT this game is on Steam, so the developers figured they could be a bit more innovative. So what did they do? Well, they made a hidden object game where I struggled to find hidden objects. Not because these objects were well hidden but because I didn’t have that many opportunities to actually go looking for them. Instead, I was stuck going through rooms, looking for a way to progress so that I can look for more objects. [h1] The developers seem really proud of their puzzles and clues. So proud that they didn’t even let me enjoy this game [/h1] I mentioned above that I find HOPA games relaxing. While they do have some puzzles thrown in, the majority of the game is relaxing as you search for specific things in huge piles of junk. OH, but not in here, oh no! I had to EARN the right to look through another pile of junk by figuring out what the developers were thinking when they made this game. See, instead of looking for hidden objects, like in most HOPA games, here, you will spend the majority of time figuring out what the clues actually mean and how to use this item with something in the environment. So, it sounds more like this game wanted to be a point-and-click adventure game instead of a HOPA, huh? Well, either way, it fails. The game fails as a HOPA game because it has huge walls of puzzles and progression before getting to the next hidden object section and it fails as a point-and-click adventure game because the puzzles aren’t very well made or explained. For instance, you have a book at all times, where the main character journals his experience. You are supposed to constantly look through this book and figure out, based on vague clues, where to go next. The developers really want you to stop, think and figure out where to go and what to do. While this would be admirable for a game like Myst, it’s just annoying here. [h1] Not even my wife liked this game [/h1] As I was struggling to figure out where to go and what to do in this game, my wife came to the room and noticed I was playing a HOPA game. A smile appeared on her face as she sat on my lap and happily took the mouse away from me as HOPA games are something she also enjoys. We played this game together for about 30 minutes before I asked her: “Honey, are you even having fun?”, to which she said : “NO”. And that was that. That was the end of my time spent with this game. A little fact, the first games I ever played with my wife were, in fact, HOPA games and we have never had so much trouble with progressing through one. NOT EVEN AFTER LOOKING THROUGH A WALKTHROUGH did we manage to figure out how to progress and, again, we played a bunch of HOPA games in the past. [h1] Why isn’t this game just be another HOPA game? [/h1] That’s all I (sorry, honey) WE wanted. WE wanted to support our country and just buy and play a simple HOPA game and Evil Pumpkin didn’t let us. It’s so proud of its own puzzles that not even its hint system, easiest difficulty and a walkthrough wasn’t able to help us progress. Yeah, did I mention that this game has difficulties, a hint system and even RPG mechanics? The difficulty is probably there just so it can make the hint system not work and even with that, it wouldn’t matter because the hint system is absolutely useless. It will just point you to the nearest puzzle whether you have the right item or not. And as for RPG mechanics. Well, you will have items that will level up after a number of uses. They won’t change or perform better… actually they won’t do anything differently… but it sounds cool when you say you have RPG mechanics, right? [h1] Just play a different HOPA game [/h1] Overall, this HOPA game isn’t worth it. Just go to BigFishGames and play a different one that will actually let you look for hidden objects. Next game: EXAPUNKS https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198075061111/recommended/716490/ [h3]If you liked my review, feel free to follow my curator group. I’m trying to review every single game in my library. Seeing and interacting with fine folks, like you, keeps my motivation up. https://steamcommunity.com/groups/RevAMG [/h3]

Most difficult game i ever triedin thermes of what to do next

10 out of 10 Evil Pumpkin is the perfect game for Halloween and a wonderful HOG/PAC despite some of the negative reviews. This is an Advanced Hidden Object so it is not for n00bs to the genre. This game seems to focus more on Puzzles and Point and Click than Hidden Object and the atmosphere is perfect for Halloween. The story is fun and keeps you engaged. This game is not difficult unless you are relatively new to 'point and click' games. You will have to use your brain to solve some of the puzzles but nothing too difficult. There are guides if you are not sure what to do next -which I used a few times. My 5th grade niece played through the game without any issue. I found this game pleasantly challenging in parts so it is not so 'mindless' as some of the more basic entries in this genre. I was able to earn all the achievements. All HOG/PAC developers should pay attention to this game. I would love to see more games like this. Highly recommend to anyone wishing for a true challenge in the Point and Click/Hidden Object genre.

It was a quite nice hidden object point and click, until it bugged in a way that was absulutely game-breaking. I tried everything to get around the bug, to no avail. It was early enough into the game so I don't feel I got my money's worth, even at $10. Pros: Looks good, solid gameplay Con: Literally game breaking bugs

I bought this game for Halloween, hoping to enjoy a nice casual puzzle game with a Halloween theme, instead I got a game that is so illogical that it was nothing more than a chore to finish. The story (if that's what you want to call it) makes no sense whatsoever, it's like the guy who wrote it was on some kind of hallucination trip. Unfortunately, what's even worse than the story are the "puzzles" themselves. Nothing makes sense, all you do is keep clicking all over the screen, hoping that you might get lucky to find what item interacts with another item. Normally, though, you just end up waiting for the hint bar to reset, and use that instead. Even after finding the right combinations, they just don't make any sense whatsoever. I'm stubborn, so I finished the game, but I really wish I had saved myself a lot of time and aggravation, and just stopped playing after the first few minutes.

I really liked this game, voice acting was crappy but the puzzles were hard and interesting. And then on the last chapter a game breaking bug happened, I couldn't proceed because apparently I had loaded my slingshot before acquiring the vortex or something to that effect and the game broke and wouldn't let me continue, cannot enter the next scene in the Orphanage. Only option acocrding to forums is to replay. Not doing that. So dissappointed. I would recommend the game and stress not to load the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ slingshot, cause if it all works out it's a lovely game, but now im just rage quitting.

I really wanted to like this game. Halloween-themed Point&Click? What could possibly go wrong? Well, while the story is nothing special but acceptable the game dynamics made me quit playing this game. It's annoying and buggy from the beginning but after some time I encountered a bug I wasn't able to work around. Reloading etc. didn't help either. Didn't start anew, just quit the game.