Multiplayer pumpkin carving game is absolutely adorable and 100% spooky

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It won't stay online for long

Mayor Bones Proudly Presents Ghost Town's 1000th Annual Pumpkin Festival
(Image credit: adamgryu)

A new pumpkin carving game lets you and the rest of the carving community decorate a persistent, and extremely haunted, world.

The new game from A Short Hike developer Adam Robinson-Yu, AKA adamgryu, is fully titled Mayor Bones Proudly Presents Ghost Town's 1000th Annual Pumpkin Festival. It's available as a pay-what-you-want download for PC, Mac, and Linux on Itch, and the game description is very upfront about the fact that the online portion of the game is deliberately seasonal: "The server will probably go down a few weeks after Halloween." 

Before you get to that part, you'll be presented with a wagonload of pumpkins in a variety of shapes and colors. Select the most promising squash and you'll be taken right into the carving interface: carve out spots by picking points like the Photoshop polygon tool, or just smoosh away on the surface with the freeform scraping tool. Unlike real pumpkin carving, you can undo as much as you want without having to chuck the whole ruined thing into your backyard for the deer to eat.

Once you finish making your jack-o'-lantern, you can head out to the festival and find the perfect spot to plop it down, amidst all the other lovingly carved and placed pumpkins from your fellow players. You can only submit 4 pumpkins total to this year's festival so make sure you're happy with your design and placement… or just do whatever, it will all probably be offline by this time next month anyway.

Oh, also make sure you go into The Barn of Terror so you can get spooked by the 12-foot skeleton with lifelike eyes. 'Tis the season!

Meanwhile, if you're still stumped for your Halloween dress-up, check out these Squid Game Halloween costumes. 

Connor Sheridan
Connor Sheridan

I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and was formerly a staff writer at GamesRadar.