Planned Release Date: October 2026

About This Game

Howling Woods is a cozy Halloween town builder. Lay out paths and plots in a clearing in the woods, and the town takes care of the rest: crooked houses go up, curio shops open their shutters, and goblins, ghosts and witches move in. Decorate your town with all sorts of frightening structures, including haunted manors, taverns, and graveyards. The spookier your town gets, the grander it grows. Nothing costs a thing, nothing can go wrong, and every day is Halloween!

Lay It Out, and the Town Does the Rest

• Paint three kinds of plots: haunts for homes, curios for shops and breweries for workshops.

• Nine curio trades and six types of workshops, from potions, coffins and fortune tellers to the cider press and the toffee works.

• Four kinds of paths: trail, dirt, stone and cobble. Pave a street and the street lamps come with it.

The Spookier It Gets, the Grander It Grows

• Fifteen set pieces, all unlocked from the start: the Graveyard, the Haunted Manor, the Witch's Cauldron, the Belfry, the Hay Maze, the Mausoleum, the Stolen Candy Pile and more. Nothing to buy or unlock.

• Every piece radiates dread. Frightful streets hang more lights, carve more pumpkins and build taller buildings.

• A dread map shows where the town runs cold and where it is truly haunted.

• Shape the land: raise hills, dig black ponds, and plant woods, graves and cornfields.

Meet the Neighbors

• Goblins, ghosts, skeletons, witches, banshees and werewolves, and the scarier the street, the stranger its tenants.

• Goblin children run the hay maze with lanterns, crows raid the candy pile, and bats circle the belfry.

• The Tome keeps the town's register, and the Cauldron bubbles up your most dreadful residents to see who is worthy of being immortalized in it.

• Rise from a humble Clearing to the Howling Woods themselves as the town's fright adds up.

Choose the Exact Feel of Your Town. The Night Is Yours.

• The moon: new, half, full, or the slow cycle between.

• Spookiness: from a calm night to a nightmare of fog and lightning.

• Autumn leaves: from bare ground to leaf piles everywhere.

• Three different light patterns: Ember, Hex and Brew.

• Postcard mode frames your town so you can capture your favorite scenes, with filters like Moonlit, Daguerreotype and Witching Hour.

Nothing to Lose

No money, no timers, no disasters and no way to fail. Every new town begins in its own hollow in the woods, and you can reshape it until it becomes your very own Halloween haven. Save up to eight different towns so you can paint all of your wickedest town designs.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

Parts of Howling Woods were made with generative AI during development: its music and sound effects, its interface icons and store art, some of its set-piece models, and parts of its code. All of it was reviewed and reworked by hand, and nothing is generated while you play.