Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival began as a lockdown project and has now become an annual gaming tradition. My children and I paid it a visit
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n 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.
