Fear The Spotlight Review: Charming Horror In Unequal Parts

The junction between the old and the new is the common haunt of indie horror games, but few are positioned at the crossroads as perfectly as Fear the Spotlight is. First released in 2023 by Cozy Game Pals, Fear the Spotlight‘s 2024 relaunch adds an extra layer to the experience while serving as the debut of film production juggernaut Blumhouse’s dip into game publishing. The game mixes a modern approach to storytelling and presentation with a gratuitous serving of analogue fuzz, calling horror titles from the original PlayStation to mind while never quite mimicking them.

Fear the Spotlight‘s story starts with minor stakes, following two high school girls as they sneak into a school library after hours. In the lead-up to a candle-lit session of spirit summoning, chatter between the two characters sketches their outlines. Vivian is bookish and relatively meek, while her companion Amy is perfectly comfortable dressing goth and jimmying locks. Predictably, things start to go haywire once the Ouija board is all set up, and Vivian ends up separated from Amy in a school that suddenly feels more alien and hostile.

Fear The Spotlight Is A Tale Of Two Stories

The Best Of Times & The Most OK Of Times

Vivian and Amy remain the center of the story, naturally, but Fear the Spotlight‘s primary campaign plays around with a few ideas as it develops. For a while, the plot feels like a basic anti-bullying treatise, with notes found around the school recounting teen cruelty and highlighting the inefficacy of the faculty’s attempts to counter it. From many of those same notes, the drama surrounding a high school stage production starts to emerge, playing out a riff on The Phantom of the Opera that points toward the school’s dark history.

Within the scope of two hours or so, Fear the Spotlight‘s main story never had much chance of being operatic in its own right, but it still feels like it wastes some of its time. Most of the narrative elements are simplistic, and despite eventually building to a memorable visual climax, the plot doesn’t come together with much of a wow factor. Past a certain point, I found myself craving a more distinct voice, something that never quite emerged. Not within the main story, at least.

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Thankfully, the Blumhouse relaunch of Fear the Spotlight is more than the main story. After beating the first campaign, a second one unlocks, and it’s a lot more than just a trivial bonus. The latter half of the experience approaches the narrative from a new angle, one that Cozy Game Pals has been careful to avoid spoiling. It’s in this addition that Fear the Spotlight secures its standing, and although it’s not of a dramatically different quality, it was enough to shift my opinion of the game for the better.

There’s a lot to like about the second campaign, and much of it centers around having a story that ultimately feels more personal. This bleeds into everything else, from an environment that’s less repetitive to the visceral impact of smashing a hammer through glass and stone whenever the situation calls for it. Tacked onto a game that was already complete in its own form, it’s a bit Frankenstein in nature, but it comes across as a product of developers who are now just a bit more experienced and confident.

A Moderate Fear Factor Has Great Moments

Reasonable Thrills & Chills

Both halves of Fear the Spotlight have their strengths. As a horror game, it’s not going for anything gratuitous, but it does have moments that showcase a strong command of the essentials. The best bits usually lean on the sound design, alerting the player to off-screen presences in ways that keep any area from feeling completely safe. The primary threat is the titular spotlight, which leaves Vivian gasping for breath if she doesn’t have a fresh inhaler on hand, and the cat-and-mouse game that emerges is often gripping.

At times, the spotlight can feel more annoying than scary, especially when puzzles demand repeated crossings of a hallway that it monitors. This is another element that the second campaign simply does better. Although the spotlight’s presence isn’t quite as justified the second time around, it’s used in a way that attempts to make amends for that, and more thoughtful choices about when and where to deploy the threat pay off nicely.

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The aesthetic of the game also does some heavy lifting, with visual effects providing a layer of texture that can effectively incubate unease. It’s often not the environments themselves that prove the most compelling, but the emptier spaces within them. Pixels crawling across the middle distance accomplish a lot more than blank grayness, especially when the emergence of the spotlight or an unfamiliar face comes as a genuine surprise.

Pleasant Puzzling With A Minor Hitch

Intuitive Solutions In An Awkward Interface

The puzzles themselves are generally good, even if none present challenges tough enough to be memorable. With a lot of wandering about to grab the right tools for the right tasks, there’s a lot of point-and-click DNA in the endeavor, spiced up a bit with the ability to physically turn cranks, pull out drawers, and even pry clutched fingers apart in the style of an immersive sim. Once again, the second campaign finds a slightly more consistent groove with the puzzles, but both parts are satisfying enough.

One element of the system seriously started to grate on me, however. Rather than being able to select the appropriate tool from the inventory before interacting with an object, every interaction requires Vivian to first select it bare-handed before getting bounced to her inventory to select an item. It doesn’t sound bad, but it becomes annoying when the cycle of interacting, seeking out the right item, coming back, interacting, sitting through the same text box, and only then getting to actually select and use the item repeats ad nauseum.

Final Thoughts & Review Score

Solid Horror Without A Silver Bullet

Aside from that relatively minor issue, there isn’t much to actively dislike about Fear the Spotlight. It’s easy enough to critique – much of the affair could still be slightly punched up, and the game often presents the awkwardness of teen relationships under a less intentional layer of awkwardness attempting to replicate that. But it’s largely good and occasionally great, and the second campaign makes it easy to walk away from the experience on a positive note.

More than anything, Fear the Spotlight asserts a strong future for Cozy Game Pals, a studio that could accomplish a lot if it keeps iterating. It’s also a nice foray into gaming for Blumhouse, and the willingness to invest in something of its nature proves that the company could have value in this space. While Fear the Spotlight isn’t a definitive horror title, it’s a largely charming experience that’s better now than it was before.

Vivian and Amy sneak into their high school to perform a séance, only for things to go horribly wrong. Amy vanishes, and Vivian must navigate the dark halls, avoid a terrifying monster, and uncover the truth behind a deadly tragedy from decades ago. Puzzle-solving and stealth are key to survival.

Pros

• Second campaign is particularly gripping.
• Fantastic sound design.
• Creepy visuals.

Cons

• Interacting with objects can get repetitive.
• Awkwardly-written teen relationships.