Howling Woods

Howling Woods is a cozy Halloween town builder. You lay out paths and plots in a woodland clearing, then watch houses, shops and workshops appear as goblins, ghosts and witches move in. Decorating the town with frightening structures makes it spookier and helps it grow; nothing costs anything, nothing can go wrong, and every day is Halloween.

Build your town

You place three kinds of plots: haunts for homes, curios for shops and breweries for workshops. The town has nine curio trades and six workshop types, including potions, coffins, fortune tellers, a cider press and a toffee works. Choose from four path types—trail, dirt, stone and cobble—and paving a street adds street lamps.

You can place 15 set pieces, all unlocked from the start, including the Graveyard, Haunted Manor, Witch's Cauldron, Belfry, Hay Maze, Mausoleum and Stolen Candy Pile. As dread spreads, streets gain more lights, pumpkins are carved and buildings grow taller. A dread map shows where the town runs cold and where it is truly haunted. You can also raise hills, dig black ponds, and plant woods, graves and cornfields.

Meet the residents

Goblins, ghosts, skeletons, witches, banshees and werewolves move into town; the scarier the street, the stranger its tenants. Goblin children run through the hay maze with lanterns, crows raid the candy pile and bats circle the belfry.

The Tome records the town's residents, while the Cauldron brings up your most dreadful inhabitants to see who deserves to be immortalized in it. As the town's fright adds up, it rises from a humble Clearing to the Howling Woods themselves.

Set the atmosphere

You can choose a new or half moon, a full moon, or the slow cycle between them, and set the spookiness from a calm night to a nightmare of fog and lightning. Autumn leaves range from bare ground to leaf piles everywhere, and three light patterns are available: Ember, Hex and Brew. Postcard mode frames your town for capturing scenes, with filters including Moonlit, Daguerreotype and Witching Hour.

Shape and save

There are no timers, disasters or ways to fail. Each new town starts in its own hollow in the woods, which you can reshape, and you can save up to eight towns.