Fear the Spotlight Review (Switch eShop)

When Blumhouse Productions announced its venture into the video game industry with Blumhouse Games, it would have been all too easy for the company to lean on some of its most recognisable IPs for its first release. Franchises such as Insidious, The Purge, Sinister, and Paranormal Activity certainly have strong potential within the video game realm, but Blumhouse has instead chosen to take a chance on two-person development team Cozy Game Pals and their debut title, Fear the Spotlight.

And boy, was it the right decision! With its low-fi, PS1-style visuals, tactile puzzles, and a sharp focus on atmosphere and dread, Fear the Spotlight is a wonderful venture into the unknown that will keep you enthralled throughout its five-to-six-hour runtime. Very minor performance hiccups aside, if you’re after something spooky yet approachable to complement your Halloween celebrations this year, Cozy Game Pals’ narrative horror is the perfect choice.

Taking place within the halls and corridors of a typical high school complex, you take on the role of Vivian as she and her friend Amy break into the library and set up a séance with a Ouija Board and a bunch of candles. After a delightfully spooky scene in which the Ouija Board takes on a life of its own, Amy vanishes into the darkness, and it’s up to Vivian to explore a now-dilapidated high school in search of her missing friend.

Fear the Spotlight’s impressive use of atmosphere is apparent right from the start. The blocky, polygonal assets are very much a call-back to the PS1 and N64 era, but what might have been a fairly unpleasant-looking game for some has been greatly elevated by excellent lighting, an immersive behind-the-shoulder camera setup, and a visual noise filter to help darker environments look creepier and imposing. You can turn the latter option down if you’re finding the effect a bit too much. Performance remains mostly stable throughout, but some of the more effects-laden setpieces can cause rare, minor frame rate drops.

Similarly, the sound design here is a delight. There’s very little music in Fear the Spotlight beyond the dread-inducing ambient track that plays whenever the game’s evil entity crops up, but otherwise your experience will be propped up by excellent diegetic sounds. Creaking doors, crackly radios, and mysterious bumps and thumps as you sneak your way through dark corridors will keep you in an almost constant state of anxiety and fear.

Gameplay is primarily a combination of exploration and puzzle-solving. Think of it like survival horror, but with less 'survival'. As you make your way through the school, you’ll find that many passages are blocked by intricate mechanisms requiring multiple items scattered throughout the classrooms and halls. Obtaining said items is generally a case of solving tactile puzzles, and the way that you interact with these is incredibly immersive.

You’ll be turning knobs, removing screws, pulling levers, plugging in cables, and much more. When you interact with a puzzle, the game switches to first-person where you’re able to move a cursor around and interact with the in-game objects directly. It's incredibly satisfying, and the immersion is amplified by strong use of the Joy-Con’s rumble feature, providing feedback for each and every object interaction.

Of course, it wouldn’t very well be a horror game without some sort of menacing entity keeping tabs on your journey throughout the school. Occasionally, particularly within much darker areas of the game, you’ll encounter spooky humanoid creatures with bright white eyes peering at you in the darkness. They might be lurking behind the corner of a hallway, crouching behind desks or chairs, or perhaps even squatting down atop some library shelves. They’re not particularly dangerous, but their presence is always unnerving, particularly when you merely glimpse their presence with your flashlight before they dart out of sight.

What you’ll need to be on guard for, however, is a monster that stalks you at set intervals. Designed to look like a zombified human with a searchlight in place of a normal head (reminding us slightly of the Obscura enemy from The Evil Within 2), this thing will slowly weave its way between desks and obstacles, casting its fiery light across the ground in search of you while leaving a trail of burning flames in its wake.

Avoiding the monster is simply a case of crouching down and making your way slowly to your destination while using objects to hide from the spotlight. If it catches you, Vivian will take damage via her asthma condition, requiring the use of inhalers found littered around the environment. These encounters won’t prove to be particularly difficult since the game is much more concerned with telling its story, but they’re nevertheless very effective at providing bursts of sheer terror amidst the otherwise quietly foreboding high school.

Speaking of story, everything found within the game, from the student notes to the discarded news clippings, goes to supporting the overall narrative. Nothing is wasted, and even the creatures found within the high school are given a reason for their presence, provided you’re willing to interact and read every piece of lore lying around. It’s a wonderfully told story with a tragic background in which a school fire stole the lives of multiple students, and the way that the events unfold along with the administration’s role in covering up the incident is never less than enthralling.

Once you’re done with the campaign, you’ll unlock a chunk of additional content, the specifics of which we won't dive into here. Needless to say, completing Vivian’s story is well worth the time and effort, and thanks to the largely forgiving difficulty throughout, Fear the Spotlight is a comfortable must-play for both fans and newcomers to the horror genre.