People do a lot of things out of love, and that list grows when you’re in high school. You can stick about a thousand One Direction photoshoots in magazines on your bedroom wall, as I have dutifully done, or you can summon several excited spirits with a Ouija board, like Vivian, the main character of Fear the spotlight. The short third-person horror game is the first released by horror film producer Blumhouse’s new game publisheralthough it is much more sensitive than the often vicious films — Megan, The purification, Dashcam — Blumhouse is associated with. Instead, husband-and-wife developer Cozy Game Pals offers a fragile, lo-fi horror experience that’s as freaky as it is sugary sweet.
The responsible nerd Vivian, with her cloudy glasses, is in love with Amy, the goth girl from her school. When I start playing Fear the spotlight as Vivian, everything I carry within me Silent HillInventory in style is a pink envelope containing a letter that I want to give Amy to confess my feelings. But in the upper right corner of my inventory, I also see Vivian’s pink lungs, which flash with green, yellow, or red light depending on her health status. Vivian has asthma, so unless I pick up one of the many inhalers hidden throughout the game, I have to be careful with her heart.
First I just have to get through the night. To impress Amy, who has teenage witch tendencies, Vivian organized an exhibition on the occult in the school library and placed a weathered Ouija board in it. Tonight Amy wants to use it, so I help her light some candles and put my hands on the planchette. Almost immediately, the lights go out, Amy goes missing, and I prepare to go through a twisted version of my high school to find her.
It’s the exact same story – with the same puzzles and resolution – that Fear the spotlight had in 2023, when Cozy Game Pals first released it. People who finished the game a year ago may not want to replay the (perfectly paced) two-hour campaign, though Fear the spotlightThe Blumhouse Edition also features console ports, additional language translations, and new story content that players can access once they’ve completed the base game.
Anyway, Fear the spotlightThe game’s horror is the kind that builds up slowly – like blood around a scraped knee – so there’s still value in revisiting the game and letting the more disturbing aspects gradually tear you open. Like the low-poly graphics, which give the game the same muddy quality of a lost teddy bear, left in the rain. Admittedly, these PS1 graphics make Amy and Vivian look like extras The Lego Moviebut they also strengthen Fear the spotlight‘s surreal environmental details, including skinned lovebirds and burnt roses.
Although it is more romantic than the games that inspire it, Fear the spotlight is clearly an homage to 90s and 2000s horror, and I mostly see elements of that Silent Hill and the high school survival horror game Obscure in it. Just like the previous one, Fear the spotlight is full of cryptic poems and puzzles, including one that requires you to tap the bloody piano keys in the correct order, as you were supposed to do in Konami’s 1999 game. Like the last one, Fear the spotlight turns his school environment into some kids’ hell and Carrie think it is. Shortly after Amy disappears, Vivian is sitting in the library taking turns as black and crumbly as an Oreo, when a fire breaks out and pushes her through a crack in the wall. There was also a fatal fire at the school decades ago, although the fire I experience as Vivian seems more supernatural. Before it started, I saw dark figures with white eyes staring at me between the bookshelves.
As soon as I emerge from the wall and see that the school is now dirty, empty and equipped with telephone booths, I feel more certain: I have been transported into the past, and pieces of spiral notebook with scribbled notes from students offer insight into why I am here am. It appears that the historic fire was not an accident, and that Amy, with her psychic connection to the spirit world, could have been a victim of it as well.
In reaching her, I’m forced to dodge a terrifying recurring enemy: a man, apparently, with a bloody shirt and a spotlight for a head. As he wanders through hallways and rooms, hissing that he knows I’m in there, the orange beam from his skull searches for me and incinerates my entire body when it finds me. “Fear the spotlight”, you know.
Inhalers, as I said, cure Vivian of damage, but since she is not equipped for battle – she was prepared to confess her feelings and not take on the underworld like Orpheus – I deal with the spotlight enemy by running and hiding under things like desks. I’m getting into a comfortable habit of this, although avoiding the spotlight is sometimes impossible and often leaves me screaming in frustration. If even a millimeter of hapless Vivian’s body protrudes from between the lockers or rubble, the spotlight zaps her entire body in a way that feels unintentional and uncreepy. To make Fear the spotlightSince the sometimes unfair enemy encounters are even more tiring, the game’s final battle puts an end to the sneaky self-preservation I have to use throughout the game. Instead, it requires me to take an offensive position in a clumsy telegraphed battle, and I couldn’t wait for it to be over so I could get back to enjoying the fight. Fear the spotlight‘s much more compelling interpersonal drama.
But after the credits roll, I enjoy it Fear the spotlight‘s bonus content, allowing me to play through the same story from Amy’s perspective. Because Amy spends almost everything Fear the spotlight‘s basic game in psychic purgatory, its perspective is interesting and conceptual.
After she disappears from the Ouija board table, it feels as if she is locked in a dilapidated version of her childhood home, which is locked and guarded by puzzles. I need to find the painting of Jesus to place on the candlelit table, use the hammer I found to rip plywood off a door frame, etc.
Through all of this, I receive creepy voice recordings from Vivian on my phone, indicating that someone has been listening to us for a long time to get closer to each other. Sometimes I get to peek through the peephole of my closed front door and see what Vivian has to go through to find me, which only makes me more excited to get outside. It doesn’t help that I’m haunted by my childhood fear: a giant, soaking wet demon from a movie I watched. When my stealth inevitably fails and she tries to rip my insides out with her hand, I have to smell the incense sticks I pick up around the house to calm my mind and restore my health.
But for Amy, getting impaled by mythical creatures to reunite with Vivian is worth it, just as Vivian is willing to be zapped by a hundred demonic spotlights to find Amy. This dedication, even more than Fear the spotlightThe game’s fantastical, hallucinatory setting had me glued to my Switch screen.
That’s unusual for me. I mainly play horror games for scares, to distract myself from what I think is the horror of my life – my anxiety disorder and another round of insomnia, which can keep me awake for days. On the worst occasions I become too exhausted to do anything other than cry with the lights off. But Fear the spotlight offers me comfort over escapism. It tells me that love is everywhere, especially in the dark.
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