It took about five seconds to figure out Ghost Town might be something a bit special when I first played it earlier this year. Before you even hit the ‘start’ option, you’re transported to a dingy, moonlit South London car park in the driving rain. Fog drifts over litter-strewn tarmac, police sirens wail unseen in the distance, a concrete council block looms overhead, and just for a moment – even though I’ve not lived in London for over a decade – it felt a little like coming home. I’ve got a lot of good things to say about Ghost Town – it’s easily one of my favourite games this year – but more than anything, its sense of time and place is utterly transporting.
Ghost Town – which just launched on PSVR2 following its celebrated release on Meta Quest and PC VR earlier this year – is great at this stuff. One minute you’re in a haunted theatre – all dusty red velvet and faded splendour – the next you’re on a fishing boat, bobbing on the angry grey waters of the North Sea. London’s back alleys are so vividly realised you can practically smell the urine! Wherever it takes you, be it the mortal realm or the planes beyond, its gloomy invocation of 1983 England is wonderfully convincing. This is the era of Thatcher, the bedroom coding boom, the birth of the New Romantics, and the £1 coin – a grimier, greyer, and frankly far more refreshing evocation of the 80s than the overplayed crop-top-and-shopping-mall nostalgia of Stranger Things. Not that any of this stuff directly intrudes upon Ghost Town, but there’s an air of authenticity to it all (I say this as a child of Willo the Wisp and Manic Miner) that brilliantly grounds an otherwise fantastical game.
This time, you see, developer Fireproof Games trades the occult Victoriana of its award-winning The Room series for full-on urban fantasy (a refreshing turn, given the genre remains curiously underrepresented in video games), dropping players into a world where magic co-exists with the mundane, where witches and wizards do spywork for the Ministry of Defence, and where something dangerous is stirring deep beneath the streets of England’s capital. Amid all this is South London witch, ghost hunter, and protagonist Edith Penrose, desperately searching for her missing younger brother, Adam. Admittedly, Ghost Town’s take on urban fantasy isn’t particularly radical but what it loses in originality it gains in the telling. And on that front, Fireproof’s first-person supernatural mystery adventure is a gem.
Before I get too distracted by the bigger picture, I should probably say Ghost Town is a puzzle game at heart, and if you’ve played Fireproof’s The Room series, the evolution from that to this is clear. Ghost Town is a game similarly obsessed with manipulation, where interactivity and physicality intertwine in a way designed to draw you deeper into its world. And in a world that feels as richly realised as Ghost Town’s, that’s a particularly potent combination.
Here, Fireproof takes the fascinating tangibility of The Room’s beloved puzzle boxes (which the studio expertly translated from touchscreen swipes to 1:1 movement in 2020’s The Room VR) and goes further still. Those wonderfully intricate devices – strange, alchemical contraptions fashioned from magic and machinery – are as well-represented as ever here, and their innate inward nature combines with puzzles spanning outward, forming elaborate chains across entire rooms. It’s satisfying stuff, if rarely especially challenging; Fireproof sensibly prioritising narrative momentum over difficulty. But you’ll also encounter more mundane interactions (levers to yank, elevator buttons to punch, jerryrigged computers with clicky switches and big, chunky dials) adding another layer of engrossing verisimilitude to Ghost Town’s world.
But back to the telling. It’s easy to bandy around the word ‘cinematic’ where games are concerned, but rarely does it mean very much outside of flashy cutscenes. Ghost Town, though, is properly cinematic as it unfolds around you, with a real flair for a set-piece and some impressive mise-en-scène that’s genuinely like being plopped into the middle of your own film. It starts with a flashback; you, Edith, are investigating a haunting in a long-abandoned London theatre, and Adam is tagging along for the first time. It’s a brilliantly choreographed opener, immediately setting the tone for things to come – the dialogue feels authentic, the naturalistic performances exude warmth and wit, and the vibe is cinematic in all the right ways.
There’s a great little moment just a minute or two in, for instance, as your wanderings around the theatre’s tatty foyer lead to a barred set of double doors. You grip both handles with your hands (VR, remember?) then fling them wide, doors swinging open to reveal just the most perfectly spooky corridor – all awkward angles, ominous graffiti, and moody lighting – stretching away beyond. Minutes on, you get a first big ‘wow’ as the claustrophobic corridor suddenly opens out onto the theatre’s cavernous auditorium. And it only gets better from there.
Soon, the past makes way for the present and you’re bobbing along in a tugboat out at sea. Two minutes after, you’re dodging seagulls and scrambling up jagged rocks as a perfectly framed lighthouse stands stark against the Scottish sky, waves crashing perilously below you. Still later, a flashback to suburban comforts and a hardcut from day to night; then it’s back to the rain-lashed present of your towering tenement block, creeping through its grey concrete corridors. You’ll scout out grimy London alleyways, explore long-forgotten Underground stations; there’s a sequence set on the sea bed, another that launches you skyward on an out-of-control elevator as your surroundings waver unstably back and forth in time. It just feels relentlessly, effortlessly cool, and always, Fireproof finds fun, surprising new ways to present its action. At one point, a conversation plays out simultaneously across two planes of reality and you’re free to toggle back and forth at will – the studio just going that extra mile because, one, it works for the story and, two, because it can. And that’s before thing gets really weird.
It’s just genuinely fantastic stuff; pacey, propulsive, and consistently engaging across its five-or-so hour runtime, every little element, all that attention to detail, coming together in a way that just feels right. I’ve played a lot of great games this year, but it’s Ghost Town – with its many, many brilliantly orchestrated moments – that’s perhaps stuck most stubbornly in my brain. All of which is to say that if you have the means – whether that be on PC VR, Meta Quest, or PSVR2 – this spooky little trip into the magical underbelly of England is well worth your time.