A fantastic game with an atmosphere, plot, and characters that are gripping and worthy of a trek
I’m going to cut right to the point: this game is absolutely incredible.
Fear the Spotlight was initially developed by a two-person team that started it in a sort of horror game jam, releasing it by themselves. When Blumhouse picked it up the team got funding to fully flesh out their vision, including things like voice acting and QA. It’s a throwback to the PS1/Dreamcast without fully being a PS1/Dreamcast game. That equates to the game doing a good job of capturing that nostalgia in the look and feel; it’s just like how we “remember” a game like this looking in 1999, complete with polygon wobble and screen issues, all of which we can turn on or off depending on how much of a throwback we want it to be.
But the story is the real hook, and it’s great. Fear the Spotlight is in the “three hour horror” genre that tells a compact but riveting story. It takes place when two friends head into their high school to piece together why it burned down years ago. There are puzzles to solve and notes to find, and taking place at night means that things get real spooky real quick. There’s a big supernatural aspect to the experience and no real enemies, so it’s not an action game in the classic sense. It’s just “hide.” Our health meter is our lungs because we have asthma, so inhalers are basically the healing items. As we get anxious or face danger, our breathing changes and our health goes down.
The game is creepy, and the atmosphere is true horror. There will be times when we catch little weird, creepy kids looking at us, hidden until we notice them in our periphery. We’ll be walking down a hallway and then all of a sudden, we’ll just see like little glowing eyes disappear off into the distance or feet dangling under a toilet. It’s great.
It’s not a fast moving game, and even the controls purposefully have a little of that classic “jank” that was indicative of the 90s, but it’s addition by subtraction (or nostalgia, rather). The whole experience really aims to sell us on the game being a haunted PS1 disc.
Fear the Spotlight came out at the right time, just before Halloween, and is perfect for this time of year with the cooler weather and the colors changing. Cozy Game Pals and Blumhouse Games have delivered a throwback horror experience that works on nostalgia in both idea and execution.
This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. It originally appeared on the October 29, 2024 episode of The SideQuest. Images and video courtesy the publisher.
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