Hey everyone, I got into Pico-8 games thanks to getting a Miyoo Mini with Onion OS that has baked in Pico emulation. I've lightly started learning Unity and Unreal engines, but I'm no developer by any means.
I saw and played the cart Pico Hot (previously played the vr version) on my tiny little handheld and was blown away by it existing or running at all in Pico, and I really want to learn and build a "hopefully" simple little game.
Seeing as there's vector and raster support, and there's a Wolfenstein & Doom demake, I had the thought of (I've been playing a lot of extraction shooters lately) a first person game running through an open field, stepping left or right to go around low obstacles/cover, avoiding or firing a single basic weapon (like a mosin) at random enemy spawns on your path until you get his once and die or make it a random distance and "extract". Am I an idiot with thinking this would be possible at all in this engine, or it is but well beyond my entry level of understanding?

I would say it's doable, and I wouldn't want to say it's beyond your level of understanding because it may not be! What I would say though is that I'd never recommend trying something like this as your first PICO-8 game.

You mentioned POOM and PICOHOT. POOM was developed by one of the much more experienced developers in the community, and PICOHOT was made by people who worked on SUPERHOT, so they definitely know what they're doing. PICO-8 does not have ready-to-go 3D libraries, built-in collision detection, or any of that - you'll be writing that yourself (or borrowing from someone else's cart, but even then you'll need to understand what it's doing, how to tie it in to your own code, etc). In your head, you think of this as a simple little game, but in reality there are a lot of concepts (3D playfield, collision, movement, weapon trajectory, map building, etc) that you need to tie together to make something like this happen. And learning all that stuff in PICO-8 is probably easier done with a much simpler 2D game than something like POOM, which really is a marvel.

But now that I've said all that, you should ignore me and dive in to do it if you feel like trying! Who am I to tell you what to do? :) The community here is really helpful and if you get stuck on something or want to understand how a game works under the hood, people are usually happy to help!

Appreciate it man, and yeah I know the Picohot and Poom devs are incredible. I'm slowly pushing forward and learning as I go