Blumhouse Productions is arguably the biggest name in Hollywood horror today. The studio’s ubiquitous logo appears before what feels like every other theatrically-released horror movie. It’s clear the company has made the genre its focus, and I love that. It means there’s always more to look forward to, even as results surely vary. With Fear The Spotlight, Blumhouse marks its debut in video games, which similarly excites me. Its games will also surely vary in quality, but this indie ghost story is a memorable debut, both for the burgeoning publisher and the pair of developers who built it together.
Fear The Spotlight stars Amy and Vivian, two high-school friends sneaking around school after-hours as soon as the game begins. Amy is dressed like a Hot Topic kid, while Vivian looks bookish. It gives the pair the air of an odd couple, but exploring their friendship while things go bump in the hallways helps introduce the story as they uncover a shady school history over the course of the game’s initial three-to-four-hour campaign.
Fear The Spotlight uses a PS1-style aesthetic mixed with modern touches like an over-the-shoulder perspective. In many moments, the game also switches to point-and-click mechanics, mostly whenever the game’s puzzles are being toyed with. It’s both those puzzles and the game’s scares that give Fear The Spotlight its gateway-horror vibe, and I enjoy it for that even if I’m no longer in the target audience. Though I love when games are especially terrifying, I also feel like younger or less-experienced horror fans deserve entertaining scares they can stomach. Not every game should be Outlast or Amnesia on the spooky scale.
Fear The Spotlight isn’t very scary to me, but it would work well as an introduction to the genre for the right player. That’s intentional on behalf of the two people who made the game together, so it’s not that Fear The Spotlight falls short of its goal. It sets out to be a horror game for teens most of all, and the high-school setting and characters work well to serve that audience.
With no combat mechanics to speak of, this is more of an adventure-horror game than survival-horror. That’s a subgenre that I’ve found over the years to be extremely difficult to pull off, as a horror game without much in the way of enemies or game-over screens can feel like it lacks stakes–and thus scares, too. But Fear The Spotlight works in several enemy interactions that play out in a hide-and-seek manner. You can’t fight the monster at the heart of this dark story, so you’ll sneak under classroom desks, library carts, and lunch tables, avoiding its gaze as best you can while sometimes solving puzzles right under its nose–figurative nose, that is.
Puzzles are a major part of the short story and abide by classic survival-horror tropes. Nothing is linear when you’re moving through its world. Collapsed hallways are circumvented with tools obtained through multi-step processes involving reading notes that provide clues and tracing the steps of those who were there before you. You’ll find weird locking mechanisms in doors that require crests, or strange dolls that need to be smashed in an order teased out via an odd poem nearby.
For fans of classic Resident Evil and Silent Hill games, the puzzles in Fear The Spotlight will feel familiar, though they have one quality that separates them from those genre forerunners: They’re all much more contained. Rather than explore, say, a large mansion or a foggy town, where a puzzle item you find is actually needed many meters and perhaps hours from then and there, the puzzles in Fear The Spotlight tend to involve only a few locations somewhat near each other, like when they ask you to move between two hallways and four classrooms total. Just as the scares are toned down for a horror-beginner audience, the puzzles won’t halt your progress for long. In a sense, they tutorialize the traditional design concepts of horror-game puzzles.
My biggest issue with Fear The Spotlight is its story. For a rather short game, it’s trying to do a lot at once, opening with what seems like a bullying theme before diverting down a very different path. All the while, the game is trying to tell a more personal story between Vivian and Amy, too, but these pieces feel like a stitched-together afterthought. It never gets the screen time it should because the game spends most of its time obfuscating the truth behind its central ghost story. It presents a truth to the girls’ relationship it intends to explore, but then never really does that, making their endpoint together feel unearned and glossed over.
This element is somewhat improved upon in the game’s epilogue. At about 2-3 hours, it’s more like a second campaign that further explores the events the girls’ experience during their overnight stay at school. This campaign is better designed, as it’s set in a single, creepy house with puzzles that are a bit more complicated, as though it builds on what the first campaign taught you even if you’re a beginner to the genre. It’s also scarier thanks to a new enemy who is harder to avoid, and it all comes together with a more robust, cohesive story than the primary campaign. It’s only unlocked when you beat the main game, so you’ll never see it first, but that makes it a stronger outro for Cozy Game Pals, the tiny studio making its debut with Fear The Spotlight.
This campaign happens to be the bulk of the work that the team did in the last year, after Fear The Spotlight was pulled from Steam so the team could enhance it, presumably as part of the publishing deal with Blumhouse. It winds up being a wise choice, as this second act is the game’s better, more memorable one and even retroactively improves the first campaign in some ways. Together, they tell a more complete and compelling story, even as this second campaign does most of the heavy lifting.
Though I don’t often love a retro aesthetic, I’ve found I’m much more into it in horror games–maybe that’s my nostalgia talking–and Fear The Spotlight stands out well in this way. This is partly because it’s not entirely faithful to the PS1 look it adopts. With lots more voice acting than true original PlayStation games and the over-the-shoulder presentation, it feels more like a demake of a modern game than something authentically capturing the era its sharply polygonal characters imply. The school looks great in this style, and it’s clear the team has played and enjoyed Silent Hill, as some of its locations look rusty and hollowed-out like the Otherworld realm frequented in Konami’s trailblazing series.
Fear The Spotlight is far from the scariest game you could play this Halloween season, but what may be read as a detriment for some is instead its best quality for others. With classically designed but more contained puzzles and combat-free monster encounters, it’s a game that utilizes genre touchstones in manners meant to onboard new and/or younger players. Mechanically, it’s simple, and the story doesn’t come together until you’ve unlocked and finished the second campaign, but its combination of old and new horror-game design elements makes it a creepy and clever introduction to what is my favorite genre, and what may prove to be yours, too.