The Haunted Hoard: Pumpkin Jack (PC)
There’s an old Irish folk tale about a man named Stingy Jack who was such a gifted trickster, he managed to swindle the devil himself. Managing to force the devil to lay no claim to his soul after his death seemed like quite the prize to Jack at the time, but when he did die, he found he was too sinful for Heaven and the devil honored the deal and wouldn’t take him. Instead, Satan sent him off with a carved pumpkin to serve as a light as he wanders between two worlds, or at least that’s how a popular version of the story goes. In Pumpkin Jack, the devil was instead a bit crueler, putting his soul in a jack-o-lantern that wandered between afterlifes on its vines until the day the devil called him back for a job. With a new body, Stingy Jack is sent out to do the devil’s bidding, and while you might expect this to be some path to redemption for Jack, he stays pretty much the same awful guy throughout the entirety of this spooky 3D action platformer.
Stingy Jack really is a villain protagonist, although it’s clearly more out of his motivation to get a regular body back and escape his eternal wandering rather than more active malice. Still, he doesn’t really balk at the devil’s request once he sees what’s in it for him. After years of peace, the Arc En Ciel Kingdom sees its serenity disrupted by the devil getting bored and unleashing his mindless monster army upon them. This actually goes fairly well for the devil, the war pretty much in his favor, but the rise of a mysterious Wizard who might have a hope of opposing him makes the devil recruit Jack to look into and stop humanity’s greatest hope. Jack really doesn’t care much about the reason or his enemy, and he’ll happily slay humans he encounters later in the adventure, although them mostly having their features obscured in shadows save for glowing eyes does soften how devilish Jack’s human slaying looks. However, the Wizard is at least an awful sort himself, willing to use and sacrifice humans for his own aims, but Jack makes it pretty clear he’s not trying to be a hero. He’s just trying to get the job done and often complaining about the characters he meets along the way, even the nervous crow who joins his side and provides occasional banter still just another character Jack grumbles at along the way. The story does seem to be angling for more gleeful evil than anything with serious consequences, but it is rather impressive that the developer committed fully to the idea that Stingy Jack hasn’t an ounce of regret and has undergone no growth in his long time as a pumpkin.
Your spooky villainous romp takes place across the surprisingly slim set of six stages, but if you’re looking to grab all the goodies on your way through them, they can take anywhere between 30 minutes or an hour depending on the size and what you face in the stage. Traveling through graveyards, swamps, and even a medieval war zone, you’ll engage in a mix of platforming, fighting, and puzzle solving as you work your way towards taking down the Wizard. Combat is one of the game’s simpler elements, but it’s not overdone and the weapons you earn do keep it interesting despite it not changing too much otherwise. When you start off with a shovel you can really only swing it around, although your crow pal can be launched out periodically to attack far away foes. However, at the end of each level, you’ll unlock a new weapon, giving you something different to play with as you enter new territory. You are always able to swap to old weapons, and while at times some options like the cursed sword feel like straight upgrades to earlier options, some have attacking tricks that might make you stick with them. The shotgun has more range than most of your tools and a pretty satisfying combo string, but you have aerial attacks as well, and other weapons might have useful tricks like a strong divebomb or the power to make an explosive magic sigil appear beneath you.
When you do encounter enemies, there are a fair few optional skirmishes you can run past if you’re not interested, but Pumpkin Jack incentivizes you well to face the fight head-on. Every level in Pumpkin Jack has 20 crow skulls to find, these used to unlock new costumes for Jack. If you stand and fight enemies you can often earn a crow skull for your troubles, and enemies do get progressively more dangerous even though healing is often as easy as smashing nearby objects for a bit of a refill. Snot firing bats, human knights who spin around with their swords, and fiends like the phantoms and rats who keep appearing from a spawn point until you destroy it can test you in different ways, but the fights are often not too involved unless it’s a boss battle. Boss battles tend to lean more on the formula of spending time dodging their attacks until something leaves them vulnerable, Jack getting some decent use out of his dodge roll as you face the game’s sometimes creative boss designs like a gluttonous slime monster bursting out of a mausoleum or the big hammer swinging skeleton Dhor whose head is attached on a chain and swings around as he strikes. The bosses are sometimes a bit quick to figure out even though many rely on the idea of denying more and more arena space so you have to be better about dodging their light upgraded attack patterns, but even though the combat doesn’t shine, the weapon variety and the time between more involved conflicts means it won’t outstay its welcome despite its simplicity.
The platforming and area exploration is more Pumpkin Jack’s forte. Jack’s double jump and trap dodging is put to the test well and if you’re looking for crow skulls or the Christmas gifts you’ll need to more closely consider the available space to find them all. The Christmas gifts are probably the better collectable than the crow skulls despite often being easier to find, mainly because while new costumes for Jack are a fine reward, finding all the gifts in a level unlocks a letter Stingy Jack sent Santa back before he started this excursion into Arc En Ciel. Seeing him getting increasingly irate as he asks Santa for a new body each year is a fun little bit of flavor with a nice pay off to it all near the end to boot. Pumpkin Jack is particularly good at setting a mood as well, many eerie and dark places still very visible so the atmosphere doesn’t undermine the sometimes tricky jumping. The music sets the tone adeptly as well, including some spooky remixes of classical music that can be a treat to hear. Jack’s limited platforming skills are put to the test better than other pieces of the experience and some puzzly moments like needing to figure out the way to activate energy bridges slow things down but to good effect, but there are also some points where you tiptoe across planks that sort of lacked the suspense they seem to be angling for thanks to friendly checkpoints and the action not coming with that big of a risk.
Every now and then though, you break away from the regular action to indulge in different styles of play. Every stage has one or more section devoted to suddenly finding yourself moving ahead at high speed with your control mostly relegated to jumping, potentially moving left and right, and firing the crow off to break things blocking your path. These automatic riding sections can involve ideas like riding a runaway minecart, being carried by a gargoyle, or riding a spectral horse that takes the ground as just a suggestion, and they’re a neat little shift to something different albeit incredibly easy and not having much to do besides dodge whatever roadblocks might be in your way. Some other more common sections though will require Jack to ditch the body the Devil lent him to go solo as a pumpkin head, crawling on his roots to do a range of activities. Some are just minigames like matching last names on headstones or repeating back a musical pattern by smacking mushrooms while others are slower and more involved puzzle sections like needing to raise and lower bridges to guide a bomb to its destination. Not every concept is that interesting and some like headstone matching grow old before you learn you have to do them more than once, but they are more involved and challenging than the automatic rider sections, contributing a wider range of activities so that nothing in Pumpkin Jack ever grows stale even if they also never quite excel either.
THE VERDICT: A perfectly spooky Halloween platformer, Pumpkin Jack nails the eerie holiday atmosphere and its grouchy villain protagonist can provide a fun perspective on his short adventure. The range of weapons do shake up the simple combat well enough and platforming is helped along by the collectibles, but with minigame sections being a bit hit or miss or not even challenging at times, Pumpkin Jack also feels like it can’t quite find one area to serve as the standout part of the experience. Some platforming and puzzling gets close, and while it hampers a few decent ideas by overdoing them, Pumpkin Jack is mostly a decently diverse adventure where you can get some Halloween fun for a while rather than it being a game worth playing any time of the year.
And so, I give Pumpkin Jack for PC…
An OKAY rating. I didn’t want to trot out the comparison to the MediEvil games too quickly so as to give the game a fair shake, but from having a protagonist with dubious morals to having sections where your head comes off and does its own activities, it’s clear where Pumpkin Jack draws influence from and it’s not a bad source. Pumpkin Jack does need to step up its game some more though if it wants Stingy Jack to rub shoulders with Sir Daniel Fortesque though. Leaning back on riding sections or head sections that aren’t being evolved in interesting ways is probably the weakest Pumpkin Jack gets though, its platforming having some inspired moments or ones where you do need to think a bit to reach an optional collectible. Puzzle solving on the main path can be done well at times too, and certain bosses bring a bit more heat when you start to near their end so you can sometimes perish even when healing is generally not too hard to find either in destructible objects or at every checkpoint. The game does push against you even if it might have needed to expand Jack’s options if it really wanted to shake up its formula more. You get to swap to old weapons even as you unlock new ones so it’s a bit surprising that most weapons are purely combat tools rather than opening up some navigation or puzzle potential, but at least some sections like a string of challenges based on the seven deadly sins shine a bit more in their creativity despite Jack’s limited skill set.
Pumpkin Jack might cause a little sticker shock if you see it go for full price at $30, but if you do find your way into owning this action platformer, you can at least count on there being some solid seasonal fun to be had if you want some spooky Halloween action. Playing as Jack O’ The Lantern himself and quickly exploring some areas that get the atmosphere down pat certainly sets a mood for the eeriest of holidays without it heading into true horror territory, so while it might miss some of its swings when it comes to coming up with a wide range of activities for you, it still has enough hits to be worth adding to a Halloween gaming list.