Publisher: Big Potato
Title: Escape Room in Your Pocket/Holiday Hijinks
Game: The Pumpkin Problem
Year: 2022
Price: $8.99
Language: English
Internet access req’d?: Yes
Cipher types: Acrostic, anagram, Braille, steganography, null letter, number substitution
Players: 1+
Difficulty: 2 of 3
Rating: 3.5 of 5
(Box artwork and story (c) Grand Gamers Guild)
Story: It’s Halloween, and as you’re preparing to hand out candy, you discover that it’s all been replaced by healthy veggies. Knowing that this is not going to go over well with the neighborhood kids, you set out to track down the culprit and hopefully keep your house from being TP’d.
(Starting props – the deck)
The game system is the same as for the Cupid Crisis – solve puzzles and enter the answers in the app (again, there’s no text adventure interface as there was with the Birthday Burglary). Of the 18 cards, you get 12 riddles – a mix of brainteasers and ciphers. The ciphers this time include a double-acrostic, a couple null letters, steganography, an example of Braille, and a number substitution (where the numbers represent letters). Also as with Cupid Crisis, the artwork on the backs of the cards figures in with two or three of the puzzles.
(Card examples)
One of my more minor complaints is that of the four Holiday Hijinks games I’ve got, three of them have been packaged with the fronts of the cards facing you as you take them out of the packet. The packet itself specifically says to not look at the faces, so I’m not sure why the company wasn’t more careful about this little detail. This is on top of the fact that the cards are in reverse number order – that is, when the deck is face down on the table, the lowest-numbered cards are at the bottom. This makes it slightly more inconvenient to run through the deck to find the starting cards, which usually have the smaller numbers.
(Results screen, play through one)
I did pretty well this time, only needing two hints on one of the later puzzles towards the end of the game. Technically, I only needed one, since the first hint didn’t tell me anything new. I breezed through the first part of the game, but got bogged down when I had to sort through the deck several times to look at the backs of specific cards for three of the puzzles. The cards were kind of sticky, and I lost time just trying to pull them apart. I went just barely 15 minutes over the limit, netting me a score of 3.5 pumpkins. The game is rated at a difficulty of 2 out of 3, and again it’s not that the puzzles are all that hard – it’s just that a number of the tasks are really time-consuming. If you have 2 or more semi-experienced players, you should be able to win pretty easily.
The second time through, going through the motions of sorting the cards again and not looking at my notes, I finished in 9 minutes, with no hints, and a score of 5 out of 5. The game itself is ok, I just don’t care for the writing. It’s aimed at younger teenagers, or older pre-teens, and is pretty “family friendly.” Plus, the “twist ending” is really clichéd. If you like Exit and Unlock!, Holiday Hijinks is going to be a disappointment. But, if you just want to play it for the ciphers, it’s fine.
(Results screen, play through two)
Is Pumpkin Problem fun? It’s ok
Is there any replay value? Maybe once
Can you gift the finished game to someone else? Yes
Does it have ciphers? Acrostic, anagram, Braille, steganography, null letter and number substitution
Recommended for younger players, or for those new to escape room games who want to start out easy. I’m giving it a 3.5 out of 5.
===== Spoilers =====
I haven’t provided an example of the gameplay for the Holiday Hijinks games yet, so I might as well do that here.
You start out with the app, which tells you to take one card showing you five candy bars. Looking at the first two letters of each of the names, you get “SOLID PHONY.” Knowing that someone has switched out your candy for healthy carrots, you decide to talk to the neighborhood kids to learn more.
You get a set of 4 cards, with 3 puzzles related to kids having trouble with their costumes. First is Frankenstein’s monster, trying to “get in touch with his feelings.” The bolts form Braille patterns that spell out “ALIVE.” Then, there’s a pumpkin carving puzzle requiring you to draw 8 straight lines. This creates a steganography cipher spelling out “BOO.” Finally, a witch gives you a connect the dots puzzle that gives you a “HAT.”
Completing all three tasks, you get a page from the culprit’s journal detailing part of their plan for the evening. This puzzle is the standard word chain type, where you need to change one letter at a time to form words to go from FULL to MOON. The fronts of the cards you’ve received have clues to each new word. Putting the clues in order, look at the letters in the skeleton bones on those cards, which will spell “PORCH LIGHT.”
You get another set of 7 cards, for three more kids to talk to. The vampire has lost her fake teeth. To find them, you need to solve three clues, giving three words. There are three reversed clues to help you out, that spell out three words backwards from the first three. In the middle of those words in order is the key word “CARAMEL.”
The mad scientist is messing with chemicals in beakers. The beakers are marked with squares, triangles, diamonds and circles, each colored black, white or orange. There are four test tubes that have combinations of these symbols, with the rules that black and white cancel out, and orange doubles the preceding symbol before disappearing. Each test tube is graduated, and the levels of the remaining liquids in the test tubes correspond to the letters A-K. The correct answer is “ACID.”
The ghost comes with a card covered in letters and symbols. The ghost itself has symbols around its eyes. Find the matching symbols on the symbol card, then look at the letters surrounded by those symbols to spell out “SOUL.”
When you finish these tasks, you get another journal page, and have to complete another word chain, from TRICK to TREAT. Put the clues on the fronts of the cards in order, then look at the numbers of those cards. This is a number substitution, where A=1, B=2, C=3, etc. The card numbers will give you “FRIGHTEN.”
The last child is a skeleton, and you’re tasked with looking at all of the letters in the bones on the backs of the cards. Each bone has a pair of letters, which form chains. You want the chain from L to T, (L-I, I-G, G-A, etc.) which gives you “LIGAMENT.”
The final two cards contain hints pointing to the culprit’s house. Things like “the lights were on,” “there was a scary spiderweb next to the door,” and “I pushed the doorbell.” Go through the backs of all the cards, and eliminate the ones that don’t fit the clues. The correct card will have a door on the back that matches those clues. Type the card number into the app, and you’ll learn that the evil villain is of course the local dentist, who has been protesting the consumption of sugary treats for years now. Congratulations, you win.
The Black Chamber 