This spooky season, which brings with it Fear the Spotlight’s release as the first in a very cool slate out of Blumhouse, feels like quite a culmination of a tremendous year for horror video games. After sampling the game’s horrific opening chapter back at Summer Game Fest, I was left wanting more. Fear the Spotlight really does feel like a tribute to so many of the classic games that paved the way for it, from its lo-fi, dithering graphics that leave enough doubt in your mind to jump at shadows, to its tactile, hands-on puzzle solving.
Fear the Spotlight, which is an expanded upon iteration of its release only a year ago, begins on a stormy night as Vivian, the player-character, and Amy break into Sunnyside High to perform a seance in the school’s library. Quite predictably, things go haywire as the supernatural descends upon their night, leading to far more trouble than a simple breaking and entering should. Amy is found in a fugue state before she’s drawn in by a powerful light, forcing Vivian to descend deeper into the belly of the school, which has cracked upon a portal to its past which, it seems, has plenty of skeletons in its closet to unearth after a fire decimated the campus in 1991.
Although they spend relatively no screen time together, it is the burgeoning relationship of the two schoolgirl leads that drives events forward. While I won’t divulge where the game goes, having seen where the original release rolled credits, I do think the direction of the expanded content is a genius move and undeniably builds out other characters within the game’s lore while servicing the story at large. The entire game might only be four hours, however not one, singular second is wasted.
Unlike Crow Country, another low-fi survival horror game that released this year, which gives its player the option to leave combat at the door entirely, Fear the Spotlight sensibly decided against turning Vivian into a super soldier who mows down ghosts and ghouls while trawling the locker bays. Although she’s resourceful, she is young, in over her head, and she’s absolutely terrified, which I think is evident through several of the design choices in the game—particularly the one to not give Vivian any offensive firepower, whatsoever.
The character’s fear and vulnerability is integral to not only the game’s overarching themes, it also plays into the tense, hide and seek encounters with the fearsome titular antagonist, Spotlight. Leaving embers in his wake, he has sure but uncertain ties to the 1991 fire. He’s a tall, slender figure with an ominous, oscillating light for a head, which strikes a horrifying picture whenever he shows unexpectedly, forcing you to sneak behind and underneath desks toward the nearest door. Seeing the ashen ghouls, who I presume are symbolic of the students lost, peering around corners and watching you is unsettling as it is, but Spotlight’s sudden and heart-pounding appearances teeter at the periphery of being iconic.
Where other games might equip you with herbs or bandages to patch your cuts up with, Fear the Spotlight once again leans full bodied into Vivian’s anxiety which can spike during these panicked chases. All it takes is a quick puff of her one-and-done inhalers with each hit serving as a calming cure-all for these moments of dread.
She’s able to make use of her book smarts to solve several of the game’s riddles which, in keeping with genre tropes, often involve scouring the immediate areas for key items before backtracking and piecing the whole picture together. I enjoyed all of the puzzles in Fear the Spotlight, even if they do lean ever-so-slightly towards being too simple, there’s a satisfying flow that sees each problem Vivian faces snowball into the next, and it really helps keeping a great pace up.
As I mentioned in the opening, there’s a wonderful, tactile feel to this game’s world and its objects. You mightn’t be able to thoroughly examine and turn items in-hand, however there’s an interactivity to everything that kept me locked in throughout. Whether it’s prying nails out of boarded windows, thumbing open the latch on a toolbox, or dialling in a phone number on a pay phone, you’re charged with every input and it’s a cool, albeit simple, touch.
Despite an obvious, and deliberate, lack of fidelity due to the developer’s pursuit of the in vogue retro, lo-fi aesthetic, everything still has a surprising amount of detail. Obviously it carries with it the warts of the style, with plenty of clipping and blocky textures, however it’s one that lends itself so well to horror. The environment design is excellent, with the school itself getting extra credit for twisting its everyday halls into something dark and worthy of the tragedy that the school faculty swept under the rug. Darkness and shadow is used to great effect, as the dithering, the grain effect that helps cement the dated appearance Fear the Spotlight is shooting for, helps in creating optical illusions.
Although there’s no real danger through so much of the game, you still second guess what the hard-to-see hallucination at the end of the hall could be. I also love that the game doesn’t resort to jump scares to unsettle its audience, relying solely on a slow, steady build to keep the player on edge.
Unlike some of its contemporaries, Sunnyside High’s map isn’t an open one. This creates a feeling of linearity throughout, which itself feels like a guiding hand showing the way. By solving small, self-contained zones one at a time, it minimises the laborious, time-consuming backtracking that often plagues games like this, but it certainly shines a spotlight, so to speak, on both the game’s overall lack of difficulty and brevity.
Fear the Spotlight might only clock in at around four hours, but it’s so well-paced and its puzzles, for the most part, feel as though they make sense in-world, which cements Sunnyside High, in my mind, as a horror spot that read the brief and passed with flying colours. It’s staggering what a team of two has been able to achieve with Fear the Spotlight, it’s a sublime survival-horror title that delivers in story and tone.
Along with being a tremendous first blow for Blumhouse’s slate of smaller-scoped horror games, Fear the Spotlight could very well be my horror game of the year. I knew there was a reason I kept out of the library when I wasn’t to school, nothing good ever comes of it.
