You tried a virtual Halloween festival – and you got more than you bargained for games

IIn an attempt to avoid spending £80 to wander around a local park with my kids to see some disappointingly scary decorations, and after failing for the fifth year in a row to get a ticket to a Scottish farm to slowly wander around looking at pumpkins, I tried something different with my kids this Halloween: a virtual pumpkin festival.

The Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival was first created at the height of the 2020 pandemic, when game developer Adam Robinson-Yu’s real-life pumpkin festival was cancelled. (Yu also made an excellent, autumnal jaunt as well.) Since then, it has returned for a few weeks each year, allowing players to come together as adorable ghosts to explore a spooky little world filled with player-created pumpkins. It’s gotten a little better every year: the big addition for 2024 was the haunted house escape room, which took my kids and I a good hour to discover, and this year there’s a movie theater showing scary silent movies to a room full of people.

Everywhere you go you see other players walking around looking like classic ghosts with painted faces and, sometimes, hats. Pumpkins litter every surface, from the benches outside the skeleton-filled barn to the hallways of the haunted house. Many of them, as you might expect, are gaming-themed: alongside a collection of burning faces made by children and cat-on-the-moon silhouettes, I notice an homage to the Hollow Knight and an accurate re-creation of Majora’s Mask from the scariest Zelda game.

The advantages of a virtual Halloween festival are many: you can’t get scammed out of £8 for a hot chocolate or cardboard-like chips from a food truck, you can carve as many virtual pumpkins as you like and undo your mistakes if you mess up, and it won’t be a problem if your six-year-old refuses to wear a coat. But I didn’t expect the Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival to be as good as it was. Behind the obvious attractions – a challenging hedge maze, tractor rides through barns filled with spooky decorations, adorable litter and terrifying jumps – hide a host of hidden secrets (and collectible pin badges) that I only found when I took an hour to explore on my own.

Take the movie theater for example: On my way out of the movie theater, I tried to open the bathroom door and found it locked. Behind the popcorn table, there is a switch; Next to the toilet door, there is an attractive symbol pinned to the bulletin board. Once I figured that out, I found another switch in one of the restrooms, and then a “restricted access” door down the side of the screen in the theater itself. The excellent little sized horror toy that lurked behind that door was actually pretty scary for my kids, and if I’m being honest, pretty scary for me. (Fortunately, you can turn off all the scary stuff in the menu, which includes fake blood spatter and the option to replace creepy images with dogs.)

The Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival lasts for a week or so after Halloween, and can be downloaded from itch.io on a pay-what-you-want basis. I highly recommend staying to explore more after you’re done carving the pumpkin.