10/31/2021
Review of PUMPKIN HATER
Developed by: Brent Porter
2018~, PC
Pumpkin Hater is a First Person Shooter that's still in development and is updated on Halloween. You shoot pumpkins as its name suggests. The name that, from what I understand, is a joke about how games like Turok: Dinosaur Hunter (6.5) could have been called Turok: Dinosaur Hater. Or any other game where you indiscriminately kill everything that inhabits a world. What I'm going to say will both praise the game and discredit my opinion. It's one of the only FPS games I enjoy, because I don't like shooting games.
However I've played hundreds of hours of shooting games since GoldenEye 007 (7) became the thing everyone wanted to play on Nintendo 64, and then later everyone had an Xbox. Still, I would always try to get my friends to play the melee weapons only mode in an FPS, which they would only be excited about for a few minutes and then go back to the regular game, and I would go back to being bored. The reason they didn't want to play using only knives or karate chops is because those felt too loose, I think, and I preferred them to using guns because it made the game feel more physical.
Shooting a gun in a videogame doesn't usually feel like I physically hit the other character with something, it just feels like I clicked the correct spot on the screen. That's because bullets don't physically exist in most games. The bullets in Pumpkin Hater do physically exist and are visible as they propel their way across the screen. They move slowly enough that you and the enemies both can dodge them. That alone makes the shooting more interesting because you need to factor in distance and space, compared to other games where shooting is two-dimensional in a way. The shooting feels good because the bullets actually connect from your gun to an enemy, and hitting the enemies feels good, because they're pumpkins.
A pumpkin breaking apart has been one of the most viscerally enjoyable sounds for me since I watched a zookeeper feed a group of javelinas by one-armedly hurling a wheelbarrow full of pumpkins into their exhibit. I've also enjoyed throwing rocks into a rotting pumpkin so it buries half-way into the shell with a thud. Pumpkin Hater captures these things well, and recognizes the connection between shooting something and something being hit, which is maybe the reason pumpkins were chosen.
Each of the four levels in Pumpkin Hater have a distinct setup. A maze, a giant tower, a bridge that you need to connect across the level, and the final stage is more open-ended. A small number of unique levels, an art style that I love, good shootin', good hittin', that's all it takes to be one of my favorite FPS games.