When the spooky season arrives each year, I forget how much fun it is playing creepy, suspense-filled horror games that add to the ambiance of the season. The safe bets are usually Resident Evil titles or maybe even Phasmophobia. This year, there has been a large influx of creepy games hitting the digital shelves, which makes the choice of scary-time gaming a bit harder to choose from. One such game is Fear the Spotlight from developer Cozy Game Pals and Blumhouse Games.
Fear the Spotlight takes a page out of the late 90s horror genre, both graphically and content-wise, where there is just the right amount of creepiness and a decent serving of good gameplay to make the experience memorable. While it won’t win any awards for narrative design or execution, it still does a good job representing the publisher’s movie background and the Halloween spirit.
So, sit back, get the Ouija board out, call upon the right spirits, and let’s take a look at this haunting title.
Story
You show me a deep and meaningful horror movie not called Hereditary, and I’ll back off my next statement. Horror movies never have some hidden, deep-seated point that makes you think too hard. They’re there to scare audiences and if you can get the right narrative in that spot, then you have created a solid horror scenario.
The story in Fear the Spotlight fits that typical horror mold, where there isn’t too much depth to the experience but features the right amount to feel like a horror game. The story for the game goes like this, two girls, Vivian and Amy, sneak into their high school late at night to speak with spirits via a Ouija board locked away in a library case. While starting as a game, once they contact a spirit, everything in the school goes haywire and the pair are transported back to 1991. To make matters worse, Vivian becomes separated from Amy, who she must find, and is being hunted down by a spotlight-headed freak who is hellbent on keeping her in the spirit realm. Vivian has to solve puzzles, track down Amy, and avoid the spotlight while traversing a dark and terrible version of her high school.
This story is like a darker version of My Science Project (1985) with a small sprinkle of Scream and The Conjuring to boot. All combined, it’s a freaky and horrifying good time. Now, the story, much like those movies I rambled off, doesn’t take anything too far or deep. It’s a simple ‘come find me in the spirit realm before we get in trouble’ story that has consequences and pressure driving the experience. In other words, it’s quite enough to make this a fun game that you get quickly engaged once everything gets going.
These types of games fall into the ‘dumb fun’ category of horror, and in this day and age, we need about as much dumb fun as we can get. The narrative here is enough and it works within the confines created for it. I enjoy the horror aspect of this goofy story and I don’t require much rhyme to its reason when it comes to explaining why it exists. It’s fun and it works. The replayability of the story does help as well.
Gameplay
The gameplay for Fear the Spotlight is broken into a couple of categories, though one outweighs most. The first category is stealth. This isn’t a Resident Evil game. You’re not going into a situation locked and loaded. You play as a couple of students who have gotten way over their heads after toying with the spirit world. As one would expect, no one is prepared to fight evil. Rather, they just want to avoid it. And avoid it they do.
The stealth portion of the game is more about hiding, sneaking, and avoiding. It’s also about timing. When you pop Vivian into a Spotlight Head scenario, where he is actively hunting her down with his giant spotlight head that will suck you into oblivion, it’s generally in an obstacle-filled room where she can hide quite easily. This might mean hiding behind flipped-over tables, cabinets, stages, or even underneath tables that have clothes in the front. This is kind of like Five Nights at Freddy’s: Into the Pit, where stealth and hiding play a big role in creating the gameplay drama and horror. It also acts as a firm reminder that you can’t relax and you must constantly understand the construct of your location to survive.
The joy of this part of Fear the Spotlight is that you have to be prepared at any given moment for Spotlight to show up. It’s like a tiny bit of T-00 from Resident Evil 2, where shit could go down quickly when you change from place to place, so being prepared and mindful of that possibility keeps your focus and eyes engaged. That alone creates a solid sense of horror for the initial situation of the game and keeps eyes glued to the set.
The second part of the gameplay in Fear the Spotlight is the puzzles. While I didn’t have a difficult time solving the puzzles, they fit into the structure and scheme of the story and stealth. For example, when Vivian is trying to access an area, she might find a glue bottle in a vending machine, a toolbox behind a locked door, and an object she has to pry loose to gain access to the next area. Knowing that you need money for the vending machine leads to searching the explorable area for loose change. Once it is found, using said change to snag the glue, figuring out a way to get to use it on the tool in the toolbox, and then using the tool acquired to get into the next area is just a 1-2-3 type of puzzle. That’s a step-by-step example of how a puzzle typically works in the game. Sometimes it can be a bit back and forth, especially when multiple objects are lying around very far away from each other, but it works.
Now, there is a good mixture of that type of puzzle in the game with more complicated pieces. For example, there is a moment in the game where Vivian has to turn on an HVAC system. The HVAC system is shut down, as fuses have been pulled from it, and there are three stages of that puzzle to complete before you can get the HVAC going again. Each stage of the puzzle has two objects to find around the multi-room area, a mathematical equation to figure out, and then the stage to activate if it was done correctly. Each stage ups the ante of the previous and eventually stealth comes into play at one point of this puzzle. It’s more complicated than the typical puzzle you run into here but nothing too outrageous where you will find yourself hating the complication of it.
Anyway, ultimately the puzzles you run into are nothing that pulls you out of the horror, but also nothing too easy that you don’t feel like you accomplished something. It’s in that sweet spot of puzzling. It works, it’s enough to entertain and give you a breather from the stealth. It also does a good job of adding more tension and suspense to the overall horror experience.
Beyond these two elements and the story, there isn’t much to the gameplay. Honestly, I’ll take that when it comes to short and sweet experiences that do enough to entertain but don’t feel like a chore when playing. For a $20 experience, this is more than worth it.
Presentation is a factor.
Whoever pitched the PlayStation 1 presentation idea at Cozy Game Pals needs a raise. When I began Fear the Spotlight, I thought maybe this was the prelude to the actual game. Maybe some weird flashback that was meant to look like a low-poly 3D experience, but would eventually smooth out to look like a modern game. As the first hour passed, I realized that this was the game. It’s a low poly shoutout to old-school creepy games from the late 90s and early 2000s, and, surprisingly, it works so well because it becomes a part of the uncomfortableness of the experience. You can’t see things clearly as you move through levels which makes you concentrate harder on what you’re seeing. Imagine looking at something so intensely that when that jump scare hits, it’s far more alarming than it should be. In addition, the intentional look and feel still has that modern-day style to it underneath, at least with how it functions and works (high frame rate – clear voice-over from characters), which just makes the aesthetic that much more unsettling (but in a good way).
This low-poly 3D environment was a perfect presentation choice for what Fear the Spotlight was trying to accomplish. It works well and it makes you pay attention, if not be fully aware of your surroundings. It helps with the horror engagement when your eyes are focused on navigating a blocky and fuzzy world.
On that sweet note, let’s wrap this review up.
Conclusion
Fear the Spotlight from developer Cozy Game Pals and publisher Blumhouse Games is a frightfully fun romp that balances out puzzles and stealth inside of a horror experience. While it won’t redefine the horror genre in gaming with its narrative, it still delivers enough to be entertaining and scary.
