‘Fear the Spotlight’ Is a Gripping Lo-Fi Throwback to PG-13 Horror Games

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The first game from Blumhouse is an inventively designed retro experience for players old and new

Everyone’s likely to remember their first foray into horror. Maybe it was children’s novels like Goosebumps or TV tween fare like Are You Afraid of the Dark? — or the unlucky few with more sadistic family (like me), you might’ve been exposed to adult-tier frights of Freddy Krueger or Jason Voorhees far too young.

But for many, it was through video games. Like it or not, gaming often serves as a blind spot for parents, who are unaware that Resident Evil and Silent Hill are offering up bloodletting and ghoulish nightmare fuel that’ll stick just the same in player’s psyches as any horror flick. Maybe even more so.

Fear the Spotlight, out Oct. 22, isn’t exactly that type of game. The first release published under Blumhouse Games, it’s a retro horror throwback to the PlayStation 1 era in look and design, but thematically is more aligned with the comfort of young adult horror. It’s just creepy enough to instill pulse-pounding anxiety, without ever taking the plunge into anything too traumatic. But as a love letter to all kinds of Nineties horror, it’s an effectively spooky and nostalgic jaunt — even if it’s coded for a decade before you were born.

A classic setup

The story begins at a small-town high school where two teenagers, Vivian and Amy, are going rogue for an overnight thrill, breaking into the library to perform an ill-advised séance. Vivian’s crush on Amy is apparent, but it’s unclear whether it’s reciprocated. After a slow burn intro, the ritual commences, summoning an otherworldly spirit that appears to have some kind of connection or fixation on Amy, who is ripped from the library’s darkness into the bright light. Now, it’s up to Vivian to figure out what’s happened to her friend.

The gameplay of Fear the Spotlight is keenly influenced by the concept of point and click titles, married with the menu-heavy mechanics of games like Resident Evil (1996). Players must guide Vivian around the shadows of the school, investigating every corner, wall, and drawer for clues not just about progressing, but about what happened behind a gruesome fire years prior that took the lives of multiple students. What, if anything, does it have to do with these girls?

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The central mystery of the game is straightforward but enticing, the stuff of classic ghost stories across the ages. As Vivian lurks deeper into the depths of the school, it becomes increasingly surreal, contorted by phantasmagoria as the past and present weave together in alarming ways, like the decades-old fire re-engulfing the school one moment only to disappear the next.

But, of course, there’s one main threat: the spotlight.

The spotlight comes in two forms: a literal cone of light, its ethereal glow coming without a clear source in the sky — and the nameless antagonist, which in true teen-horror fashion is the bloodied corpse of someone with a physical spotlight for a head. Both versions of the spotlight must be avoided by sneaking carefully around to evade detection, but the former mostly serves as a periodic nuisance to wait out, while the latter is a persistently looming threat that appear frequently and patrols rooms sporadically.

The walking spotlight is a clear throwback to classic video-game monsters like Resident Evil 3’s Nemesis or Silent Hill 2’s Pyramidhead, aberrations that appear for scripted sequences to shake things up, usually after a long stretch of quiet, eerie puzzle solving. Like with many of those classic scenes, there’s no way to fight the spotlight, it’s something to flee. In fact, there’s no combat at all.

Mysteries within mysteries

The bulk of the game sees the player moving from area to area around the school, solving puzzles to progress. Puzzles range from the surreal, like finding a clearly out-of-time object to appease a ghost, to practical, like finding key cards and fixing the building’s HVAC. The puzzles themselves aren’t particularly hard if you’re paying attention to the details of each room, you’re in, although most require a lot of backtracking. An item or note in one classroom is the clue needed for a problem in another, and there’s a lot of retracing steps to get things done.

It sounds arduous, but the developers manage to stick the landing just well enough to where the solutions feel clever, although by the game’s end, it begins to the toe the line of busywork.

But this leads to a key point that’s somewhat essential, although per embargo agreements, there are restrictions around what can be discussed in reviews. Vivian’s journey is a solid 3 to 4 hours, depending on how quickly players can find solutions, and that might’ve felt fine, if brief. But after completing the story, there’s an entire second half of the game that becomes available, one that actually plays substantially better, has a stronger tone and vision, and is genuinely scarier than the first.

Without any further detail, it’s safe enough to say that everything that works well in the primary section continues to do so in the later portions, while the story is recontextualized to be more emotionally gripping and often more frightening. The jump scares that rarely come in the first half are more frequent in the second, and its overall tone is more in line with what audiences might expect from Blumhouse productions like the Insidious franchise, rather than the more high school horror bend of the main premise.

Regardless of where its specific tone lies at any given point, the decision to go lo-fi with the visuals works dividends for creating an effectively spooky atmosphere in a game that’s otherwise somewhat low stakes. Without any gore, minimal jump scares, and just a small handful of recurring horror motifs that drive things forward, it’s almost entirely up to the games audiovisual vibes to do the heavy lifting, which it does.

Recreating an old school aesthetic

Like recent retro rival games like Crow Country (2024) and Mouthwashing (2024), Fear the Spotlight thoughtfully recreates the lower polygon count of games from the original PlayStation era, albeit with substantial quality of life improvements. The characters may look blocky, with jagged edges and flat faces, but they control smoothly, unlike the tank-like movement of the games that inspired this one.

The visuals also employ a grainy VHS filter which, paired with an intentionally reduced frame rate, gives the game a jittery, unsettling aesthetic that feels like you’re playing it in your basement on an old tube TV. There’s also a filter that morphs the polygons of the characters and world into something that feels unstable in ways that old games often did, with faces and textures shifting in and out in way most viewers would associate AI creations — but to clear, this is a very deliberate design choice that plays on the uncanniness of the visual morphing, not any way implying AI was used.

The audio design also feels anachronistically modern compared to the graphics, with a heavy orchestral score that slips from eerily somber to relentlessly heart pounding. The characters’ voiceovers are just tinny enough to feel like they belong in a shlocky horror film, but much better acted than anything delivered in true b-movie trash. The use of sound effects elevates the tangibility of the low poly world, with heavy footsteps, creaking doors, crunching and snapping locks and keys all imbuing the otherwise grainy clay-like facade with a real-life grime.

Paired with stellar lighting work, the audio does wonders to flesh out a world that might otherwise only feel creepy to those with fond memories of early horror classics, making it an effectively spooky experience for players of all ages.

Some would say that Fear the Spotlight is an entry level horror game, but that doesn’t really do justice to the aesthetic and mechanical design choices on display. It’s more catered to people who want the somewhat nostalgic, mostly measured thrill of a good PG-13 movie. The central mysteries are intriguing, if only because interactivity makes discovering their secrets a reward. The scares doled out are effective, and the lo-fi vibes are immaculate. It’s a game that starts out strong and grows better and more confident as it goes.