adamgryuCarving pumpkins is one of those Halloween activities that never really gets old, no matter how many times you do it. You get to display your artistic talent (or lack thereof), play with sharp objects, and even roast the seeds for a crunchy treat at the end. You won’t get any actual pumpkin seeds out of Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival, but it’s still a great seasonal space to hang out, carve pumpkins, and partake in other timeless Halloween activities.Made by Adam Robinson-Yu, developer of cult favorite A Short Hike, Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival is available every year from October through mid-November. While its servers are live during that period, up to 800 players (split across two servers) can log on and explore a small, extremely haunted town together. After creating your own ghostly avatar with a simple character creator, you’re free to roam around and enjoy whichever Halloween attractions catch your eye, with no real push to pursue any particular goals if you don’t want to.Players can show off their own creations in Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival. | adamgryuThe main event is the pumpkin carving contest. Before heading to town, you can use a pumpkin-carving interface to create your own artistic masterpiece, which will then be placed in the town for other players to vote on. For a small game only available for a few weeks per year, the level of detail the more ambitious pumpkin carvers have been able to achieve is extremely impressive. Click on any pumpkin you see in town and you can add a like, and even bestow a badge on your favorite carving once each day.As the game’s Itch.io page warns, the fact that users submit all the pumpkins you see does mean there’s a chance of seeing something inappropriate, but the moderation features in place seem to be working quite well, as everything I’ve seen in the game has been firmly G-rated. That also goes for its chat system, which lets players communicate by stringing together preset words to keep things kid-friendly.Outside of carving pumpkins, Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival also hosts all kinds of other Halloween activities. The town is full of houses you can explore (sometimes requiring you to sneak in) full of pumpkins, with pins to collect to show off your achievements. A tower on one side of the map offers a jumping puzzle you need to complete to reach the top, like what you’d find in Final Fantasy XIV’s most devious Gold Saucer attraction. You can take a haunted hay ride driven by a skeleton through town, complete with goofy jump scares, or try to find your way through a devious hedge maze. And all of it can be documented with an in-game camera to preserve your Halloween memories when the servers shut down in November.Half the fun of Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival is just finding all the strange gags hiding around town. | adamgryuEach year, a little bit more gets added to Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival. In 2024, that was the haunted mansion, a rather lengthy escape room that can take upwards of an hour to complete. This year, the new addition is the cinema, which continuously plays public domain films on a loop for anyone who wants a break from all the running around. While I was there, I checked out a Frankenstein film and A Trip to the Moon.For all the headline features of Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival, the best part is stumbling upon the unexpected. The simple human element of sharing space with other players means you’re likely to find some of the game’s secrets just by watching others play — for example, I watched a flying saucer soar overhead at one point, assuming it was a scripted event, only to watch it land on a roof and realize it was driven by two other players. Every corner of town seems to hold some secret or another, whether it’s a new pin to collect, a hidden minigame, or just a surprising sight gag. Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival rarely dips into real horror, and the scariest parts can even be turned off in the settings, making it fit for kids, too. Halloween is a great time to catch up on horror games, but for anyone who’s not in the mood for scares, Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival might be the best game to play this season.Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival is available for free on Itch.io.