My favorite thing about following the video game industry closely as part of my job is seeing how much it evolves over time. It’s a joy to see something like mobile games grow from playing Snake on my phone to console-quality games. And it’s similarly rewarding to follow a studio from its debut game to its bigger, more ambitious projects decades later. Ghost Town lets me see both of those evolutions play out at once.
The new VR puzzle game is the latest project by Fireproof Games. If you’ve played a lot of mobile games over the years, you may recognize that name as the developer behind The Room, an excellent series of moody escape room games. After four hits on mobile, Fireproof would expand its skillset with 2020’s The Room VR: A Dark Matter, a must-have VR game that showed how much more the studio could do. Five years later, Fireproof has raised the bar for both itself and VR gaming at large again with Ghost Town.
In The Room series, players mostly solve a series of puzzle boxes as a creepy backstory unfolds in the background. Ghost Town is very different in that it’s a narrative game first and foremost that better threads its tactile puzzles into a story. The adventure follows Edith Penrose, a ghost hunter who sets out to find her brother after a paranormal encounter. Her quest takes her from the seas of Scotland to an eerie otherworld as she casts out stray spirits and solves plenty of puzzles.
It’s much bigger in scope than any of Fireproof’s previous games, but it’s anchored by reliable gameplay. Building on The Room VR, Ghost Town has players grabbing objects and tinkering with switches to solve tactile puzzles enhanced by smooth motion controls. These sections follow The Room’s lead by throwing me in an interconnected series of interactions that I need to approach like an escape room. One has me creating a concoction in a test tube by scouring a room for clues as to what liquids I need to pour in. Another has me pointing a light around a room and finding clues hidden in the shadows it casts. Those moments are, unsurprisingly, where Ghost Town is at its best.
In between those larger set pieces, I’m doing more one-off puzzles that naturally slide into the story. When I head back to my flat and show my ghost hunting partner an artifact I’ve found, I toss it into a machine and analyze it by dragging a microphone around its surface and looking for a specific pattern as we chat. Those micro puzzles allow the story to play out more fluidly rather than between long gameplay sequences.
Though I do love that evolution of Fireproof’s formula, there are moments where I wish the one-off puzzles had a little more depth to them. Since they aren’t always built to tie into the next step, a few great ideas can be left feeling a little one-note. That’s to be expected considering that Fireproof is shaking up a formula it has perfected with five games in order a decade. It hits on some truly great ideas, like during its P.T. reminiscent finale, but there’s room to push its blossoming ideas even more.
That same dynamic can be felt in the narrative, which is the biggest swing the studio makes here. Ghost Town tells a fun supernatural story that does a great job at creating a paranormal reality where science and supernatural meet. It’s more cinematic than The Room too, with one standout chapter sending me up a haunted lighthouse as a ghost tries to evade me. The storytelling does feel a bit loose, though, as there’s a lot of lore packed into four or five hours of constantly moving story beats that don’t always feel connected. Still, it moves through some exciting set pieces that take full advantage of VR’s ability to convincingly transport us to new places.
Ghost Town feels like as much of an evolution for Fireproof Games as it does a new beginning. It’s a studio reaching its pinnacle with The Room and starting again from the ground up. I almost see it as a re-debut — and a great one at that. Though just as exciting to me is how it feels like a step forward for VR as a whole too. Just look at the jump from The 7th Guest VR to Ghost Town, two very similar paranormal puzzle games that feel at least five years apart rather than two. Games like Ghost Town continue to turn VR into a viable platform full of gems for anyone committed to the tech. Who knows where it will be 10 years from now, but I hope Fireproof Games is at the head of the table by then.
Ghost Town is out now on Steam VR and Meta Quest headsets.
