I have rarely seen so stark an illustration of the passage of time than a video game that makes a puzzle out of setting up a VCR. It’s not a difficult puzzle, but it’s treated with the same gravity as using magic emblems to open a secret door.
It’s one of several ways in which Fear the Spotlight comes off as unintended social satire. You play as a shy, introverted nerd who’s thrown back in time to 1991, where she’s stalked through her high school by an unknown entity. Now she has to deal with the dark terrors that lurk in the heart of every 21st-century teenager: real-life interactions, antiquated technology, and at one point, being forced to take a phone call.
That’s not an actual critique. It’s easy to make fun of it, but Fear the Spotlight is a decent take on classic survival horror. It might be too easy or mild for long-time horror fans, but it’d be great as an entry-level game for kids or newcomers to the genre. If you want something spooky and short to play for Halloween, it’s a good pick.
Fear the Spotlight is set in the mid-2010s, in a suburban high school in New England. Vivian Singh and Amy Tanaka have snuck into the school in the middle of the night to hold a séance in its library. For Amy, this is a fun thing to do during Halloween season. Vivian is just there to spend time with Amy, and maybe work up the nerve to finally ask her out.
After the séance, Amy abruptly disappears. When Vivian tries to leave the library, she’s somehow ended up in a surreal reflection of the school as it was in 1991, just before a devastating fire that killed two dozen students. As she searches for Amy, Vivian finds a series of clues about what and who actually caused the fire, as well as a hostile entity with a spotlight for a head.
Spotlight plays like a classic survival horror game, but swaps out most of the combat for stealth. When enemies appear, they try to hunt Vivian down with high-powered beams of light, which you can avoid by keeping furniture or walls between them and her.
It’s important to note that this isn’t a one-touch-kill game; Vivian can take a few hits before she dies. The trick is that she has to use an inhaler to “heal,” as each brush with the spotlight gets Vivian closer to a panic-induced asthma attack, and there are only so many inhalers in the game. It still provides that useful edge of panic when you’re at low health, but don’t dare heal, because you don’t know when or if you’ll find more supplies.
The rest of the game is all about the atmosphere. Spotlight makes a point of giving Silent Hill a shout-out in the first 10 minutes, and once you see that, the rest of the game makes more sense. It’s got the oppressive darkness of PlayStation and Dreamcast horror, with its grainy lo-fi graphics, but dials back the gore and gross-outs in favor of a dreamlike surrealism.
Spotlight has a knack for flipping back and forth between mundane issues and arcane strangeness at a moment’s notice without it seeming incongruous. Sometimes the school is just an old, damaged building with bad wiring, and other times, it’s a symbolic nightmare that’s held together by a strong narrative throughline. The puzzles are easy but intuitive, and even without an in-game map, I never got lost or confused about where to go next.
This is a re-release for Fear the Spotlight, which came out in 2023 as an independent project before being picked up and published by Blumhouse Productions’ new gaming subsidiary. The version of Spotlight that came out this week is an extended cut of the original, with a few additions like a much more elaborate finale.
It also features a second bonus scenario after you clear the game as Vivian, where you get to go through Spotlight again from Amy’s perspective. This initially sounds like a joke, as the first few minutes of Amy’s game is just Vivian’s in a new hat, but it quickly goes in its own direction.
I don’t know if Amy’s scenario is new for the Blumhouse re-release, but it plays like the developers had more time, money, and/or experience while making it. It has a much tighter focus on its protagonist, as Amy is stuck inside her own head while she waits for Vivian to rescue her, and gets a few new mechanics like a lockpicking minigame. It’s also one of the better examples I’ve ever seen of how to use a character’s smartphone as part of both narrative design and gameplay.
By comparison, Vivian’s game is decent, but has a couple of rough spots. I could point to a couple of specific encounters that are oddly tuned, and most of its story is told through random notes and diary pages rather than anything more organic. It might not have been a dry run for Amy’s scenario when it was made, but that’s what it ends up feeling like.
As a result, I was initially a little lukewarm on Fear the Spotlight; I described it to somebody earlier this week as R.L. Stine’s Silent Hill. Vivian’s story has some good moments but is definitely aimed at a younger audience. Amy’s story is what pulled the whole game together for me, and I ended up feeling more positive about it once I’d rolled credits.
Even with that in mind, Fear the Spotlight is absolutely PG-13 horror. Older fans or serious gorehounds might consider this weak tea, but I’d give this to a kid or a new horror fan without a second thought. I’m looking forward to seeing what the developers do next.
[Fear the Spotlight, developed by Cozy Game Pals and published by Blumhouse Games, is now available for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4&5, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PC, MacOS, and Linux for an MSRP of $19.99. This review was written using a Steam code sent to Hard Drive by a PR representative of Blumhouse Games.]
