Fear the Spotlight Feels Like a PS1-Era Horror Game in All the Right Ways

Restart took a trip back in time at Summer Game Fest. Well, not literally, but it sure felt like it as we sat down to demo Fear the Spotlight, the debut title from husband and wife development team Cozy Game Pals, which is being published by Blumhouse Games.

Inspired by classic 90s horror games (we see lots of similarities to Silent Hill in the game’s UI), Fear the Spotlight takes players to Sunnyside High, a school with a tragic history (a fire took place here in the early 1990s, claiming the lives of multiple students).

Players become Vivian, a student who breaks into the school on a stormy night with her friend Amy to perform what she thinks is a “fun” - that is, likely make-believe - seance using a Ouija board on display as part of a library exhibit. But when the seance becomes all too real and Amy vanishes, Vivian finds herself in a transformed school environment, left to find Amy and learn the truth about the school while avoiding a shadowy figure lurking in the halls (who also seems to have a spotlight for a head).

The Summer Game Fest demo for Fear the Spotlight introduced us to what should be a familiar item fetching system for classic horror fans. For instance, we were asked to find the key to unlock the cabinet holding the Ouija board, only to discover the key was behind another locked door. This required us to find Vivian’s key card to slip into the key reader so we could open the locked door to claim the cabinet key and… you get the idea.

Fear the Spotlight has an interesting CRT TV graphical overlay and blocky character designs that lend themselves to the retro theme, and by the end of the demo, we were more than a little freaked out by what we had experienced, but only in a way that made us only want to keep playing to see what happens next (did the kids’ faces on the memorial poster turn into skulls, or was I seeing things?).

For some modern touches, the game will also offer accessibility settings allowing players, in part, to increase or decrease the intensity of the retro graphical filter, as well as “polygon” and “ambient camera” wobble effects.

While the demo didn’t show off everything Fear the Spotlight has to offer (it will also feature puzzles and stealth sequences), it did a great job of drawing us in and making us look forward to the game’s release later in 2024.

Fear the Spotlight

Release Date: October 22, 2024

Digital Only

• Windows
• Nintendo SwitchBuy
• PlayStation 4Buy
• PlayStation 5Buy
• Xbox OneBuy
• Xbox SeriesBuy

Fear the Spotlight is in development for PS5, PS4, Xbox Series, Xbox One, Switch, and PC. The game is expected to receive a T rating. It will feature text localization for English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese.