The Annual Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival

“Welcome to scenic Ghost Town! There’s nobody here™”

This week's recommendation is The Annual Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival, a game by Adamgryu.

The Pumpkin Festival is a cross between an art program, an art gallery and a casual MMO. It consists of a pumpkin carving simulator, and the festival itself. The carving simulator allows you to choose from a variety of pumpkins and virtually carve them into Jack O' Lanterns with a few basic tools. The festival is an online 3D world that you can explore, with places throughout for you to display your pumpkins and see those of other players.



In the festival, your avatar is a ghost with a randomised name. You can customize your avatar with different eyes and mouths, and certain activities and secret arras will reward you with pins that you can place on your ghost for extra customization.



The game is free, with the option for donations on the Itch page. Donations over $2 USD allow you to download an alternate version of the game with cosmetic hats that your ghost can wear. It doesn’t really change anything, but it’s a nice little token for supporting the dev.

We played the Pumpkin Festival a few days before Halloween and were surprised at how much it had to offer. It was a lot of fun wandering through the activities with friends, joking around and being silly, just like a real festival. You can use canned text chat to talk with other ghosts, so it is possible to explore the festival with strangers, but I’d suggest going in with some friends in a voice chat if possible.



This was our first time attending, but it seems that Adamgryu adds more each year. We were genuinely surprised at how much there was to do, with a haunted hayride, an object-collection survival game, a haunted mansion puzzle game, obstacle courses and more. A personal favourite of mine was the Haunted Mansion, which was bigger in scope than a lot of similar indie games by itself. Some of the activities allow you to select how scary they are, ranging from horrific to comedic.



The amount and range of Pumpkins that we found were truly impressive, and a lot of effort clearly went into some of them. The festival has an in-built camera object, which you can use for easy screenshots complete with in-game spooky filters.



The Pumpkin festival is only live for a little over a month each year, from early October to “1-2 weeks after Halloween”, so it will be closing soon for 2025 (assuming it hasn’t closed already by time of posting). Giving it a limited window contributes to it feeling like a real festival and binds it to the Halloween season.

If you haven’t yet, you should give the festival a play as soon as you can, because it might not be around tomorrow. If you missed it this year, definitely give it a go next year.

You can find the game’s Itch page at the link below:
https://adamgryu.itch.io/pumpkin-carver

You can see Adamgryu’s other projects on his website:
https://www.adamgryu.com/