At Summer Game Fest, Fear the Spotlight Mixes '90s Teen Horror With PS1 Polygons

Summer Game Fest, the mid-year gaming show that’s replaced E3, kicked off with a trailer showcase featuring several first looks from new boutique publisher Blumhouse Games. The first of these is Fear The Spotlight, an indie game that evokes the grainy polygonal look of PS1-era graphics to ratchet up the ghost-story horror… but not too much.

That’s because Fear The Spotlight was created to be a kind of “accessible horror” for the spook-averse, according to the husband-and-wife team behind the game, coder Bryan Singh and artist Crista Castro of studio Cozy Game Pals.

“We have people we have in mind when we’re making this game, are our friends and family, that don’t quite like horror yet, but we think that they should,” Singh said. “We’re trying to put all this stuff we like about horror in a way that plays smoothly that’s kind of fun, kind of quirky, kind of charming, but still is really horror.”

I chatted with Singh and Crista after playing the 20-minute demo they have of Fear The Spotlight, which opens innocuously enough: Straight-laced teenager Vivian has ventured out of her comfort zone to help her rebellious goth friend Amy sneak into their high school library where they — what else? — use a Ouija board to contact the beyond. The spirits reach back out, with dire consequences.

The game’s PS1 polygons set the mood, with choppy aliased edges of characters and environments bringing the player back to the days of the original Resident Evil and Silent Hill. But the crafted nostalgia only goes so far, as the sound effects are audibly crunchy but the dialogue is crisp. Likewise, if those visual effects are too much, you can manually dial down some of the vintage PS1 look. You can adjust the tracking lines on the TV, which Singh called a “VHS filter,” as well as the ambient wobble of character polygons and the game’s camera.

“I think my favorite kind of horror is like, you don’t know if you saw something in the dark hallway — I’m not quite sure if that was just a polygon wiggle or was that a specter that I saw? And that’s something that we really play into,” Castro said.

“Our specific interpretation of the PS1 aesthetic tries to enhance that ambiguity,” Singh said.

With nods to witchy films and other ’90s culture, the game is a throwback to the textures and era of low-res scares. After two years of working on the game, Singh and Castro were approached by Blumhouse Games, which liked Fear the Spotlight’s style and accessible horror appeal. After another year, Fear The Spotlight appeared in the 2024 Summer Game Fest trailer showcase. It’s the first of the nascent Blumhouse Games’ lineup to be shown to press and the only game available at the hands-on media event.

In a screenshot of a pixelated 3D game, a teen girl crawls on the floor hiding from a spotlight-for-a-head monster. — Cozy Game Pals/Blumhouse Games

Making accessible horror means more spooky vibes than gore or jump scares. The game has no combat; instead, when a monster comes, the player — as Vivian, a scared teenage girl — sneaks around crawling and hiding. But there’s still tension, as I found in the demo. When Vivian gets down on all fours to crawl around avoiding a security camera and the view switches to first-person, her breathing gets faster. That hints at more panicked sneaking to come — hence, Fear The Spotlight.

There are plenty of puzzles to solve and items to grab as you make your way around the after-hours library, or whatever it becomes after the spirits return. As I wandered around the too-quiet bookshelves and empty tables, it wasn’t hard to find hints as to their origin. I spotted a big plaque and class photo mourning the children lost in a fire years ago, an image that turns sinister after the seance succeeds and Amy disappears.

Only to reappear, floating, possessed, before everything sets on fire, and I escape down a spooky red hall lined with shadowy pixels.

“We made a game that we’re trying to pull you along like it’s a rollercoaster. It feels like a movie in a lot of ways. But we’re also trying to lower the barrier of complexity so that it could be played by someone who’s newer to games,” Singh said.

Fear The Spotlight is headed toward PC, Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox One X/S later in 2024.