In an attempt to avoid spending £80 to walk around a local park with my children to see some underwhelming spooky decorations, and having failed for the fifth year in a row to secure a ticket to a Scottish farm to tramp damply around looking at pumpkins, I tried something different with my kids this Halloween: a virtual pumpkin festival.
Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival was first created in the depths of the 2020 pandemic, when game developer Adam Robinson-Yu’s real-life neighbourhood pumpkin festival was cancelled. (Yu also made the excellent and equally autumnal A Short Hike.) Since then, it has returned for a few weeks every year, letting players come together as adorable ghosts to explore a creepy little micro-world filled with player-created pumpkins. It has improved slightly every year: 2024’s big addition was a haunted house escape room, which took me and my kids a good hour to figure out, and this year there’s a movie theatre that plays eerie silent films for a roomful of nobody.
Everywhere you go you see other players floating around in the form of classic sheet-ghosts with drawn-on faces and, sometimes, fetching hats. Pumpkins crowd every surface, from the benches outside the skeleton-filled barn to the corridors of the haunted house. Many of these, as you might expect, are gaming-themed: alongside a brace of presumably child-created gurning faces and cat-on-moon silhouettes, I spotted a tribute to Hollow Knight and a fastidious recreation of Majora’s Mask from the scariest Zelda game.
The advantages of a virtual Halloween festival are many: you cannot get scammed out of £8 for a watery hot chocolate or cardboard-like chips from a food van, you can carve as many virtual pumpkins as you like and undo your mistakes if you mess it up, and it is not a problem if your six-year-old refuses to wear a coat. But I did not expect Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival to be as good as it is. Behind the obvious attractions – a challenging hedge maze, a tractor ride through barns full of endearingly rubbish creepy decorations and jump scares – hide a bunch of hidden secrets (and collectible pin badges) that I only found when I took an hour to explore on my own.
Take the movie theatre: on my way out of the cinema, I tried the door to the bathroom and found it locked. Behind the popcorn counter, a key; beside the toilet door, an enticing-looking code pinned to a notice board. Once I figured that out, I found another key in one of the toilets, and then an “access restricted” door down by the side of the screen in the theatre itself. The excellent bite-sized horror game that lurked behind that door was actually too scary for my children and, if I’m honest, for me. (Thankfully you can turn all the frightening things off in a menu that includes fake-blood spatter and an option to replace scary images with dogs.)
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Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival is running until a week or so after Halloween, and can be downloaded from itch.io on a pay-what-you-want basis. I highly recommend sticking around to explore more after the pumpkin-carving is done.
