The term “pumpkin carver” definitely doesn’t do the Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival justice. You have to experience this for yourself.

You’re a ghost. Not a particularly scary ghost, admittedly. You roam a world comprised of a small town with a Halloween carnival, along with other ghosts: other people across the internet, not Ghost Town NPCs.

The online community aspect (the other people you encounter when you’re exploring here) only works in October–November. I found this between Halloweens last year, so I first explored it during the game’s off-season when no one else was there. The servers that manage the online community were offline, but the environment itself is part of the download, so you can play Ghost Town locally any time. There’s just nobody else there playing it with you.

I think the off-season has to be the eeriest way to experience the game. The feeling you get wandering a small, deserted town at night—just you and you alone, when no one else is around and the only sign of life is the occasional light behind a window: that, I’d say, is when the game comes closest to conveying what it’s really like to be a ghost.