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Caravel Forum : Other Boards : Electronic Games : Mr. Pumpkin Adventure (A click-and-play adventure game with codebreaking.)
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ErikH2000
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icon Mr. Pumpkin Adventure (+2)  
https://store.steampowered.com/app/491220/Mr_Pumpkin_Adventure/
It's also on Xbox One and maybe other things.

There is a bit of a story that adds flavor to the puzzling, but it's fairly simple and ignorable. The surreal art is really appealing to me.

I liked the music too, but I wish they would have paid the musician to make some longer loops. Those loops remind me of when I was budgeting for DROD music and trying to figure out how many seconds or minutes to commission on each part. We added a lot of music and the alternating song scheme to try to stave off monotony. Music is actually the thing I spent the most money on in DROD.

There is no controllable main character. You just click on what you want to interact with. This again made me think of budgeting a game on the cheap. Making background stills is much less work than animated characters that move around, bump against obstacles, and look correct in all the nooks and crannies of the game world. But, unlike the music, I can get behind this design choice. It's actually pretty nice to just click on things and have the action happen regardless of whether your character is nearby. And since much of the game requires you to scan through rooms multiple times to look for things missed, the quicker navigation is good.

The puzzles are mainly code-breaking and pattern-matching. For example, there will be a combination lock with some pictures on it, and you have to notice that something like those pictures is found in a different room, which is associated with a different symbol appearing on the lock. There is a lot of that, so if you don't like that type of puzzle, don't get the game.

There were a handful of puzzles that I cheated on after I got stuck. In some of these cases, the solutions seemed a little unreasonable to arrive at, but maybe I missed a clue or rationale somewhere. The problem with walkthroughs is they usually don't say why you should do something. Maybe that's a good punishment for cheating at puzzles - not knowing why a solution is correct.

For anyone who gets stuck, I will tell you that the game difficulty doesn't go up much as you progress. So cheating past a hard spot can move you on to more enjoyable gameplay. And you probably won't get immediately stuck again, because it's more likely that you just missed some detail or association than that the difficulty has ramped up past your limit.

Thinking about Ezlo's reaction to Gorogoa's weird story that never became clear at the end... I would say, the story here may leave you feeling the same way at the end. My advice is don't worry about understanding this story. I think it's just meant to be funny, weird, and evocative - not deep.

-Erik

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The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
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Caravel Forum : Other Boards : Electronic Games : Mr. Pumpkin Adventure (A click-and-play adventure game with codebreaking.)
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