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When Blumhouse Games announced that it would bring its first project to last June’s Summer Game Fest showcase, no one was quite sure what to expect from the new publisher. Certainly not the ambitious slate of six indie games developed by a group of small (and scrappy) teams from around the world, covering multiple subgenres, and none based on existing Blumhouse properties—no Paranormal Activity Simulator or Insidious: The Game. Yet, that first presentation in front of a live audience at the jam-packed YouTube Theater in Inglewood, CA, perfectly communicated the new label’s mission: to champion original passion projects from creators who are exploring the horror genre in new and unexpected ways.
Founded by horror film magnate Jason Blum in February 2023, Blumhouse Games takes the same entrepreneurial approach to the small-budget indie projects it chooses to fund as Blum’s well-known film and television production arms. By betting big on the little guys, starting with viral found footage mega-hit Paranormal Activity, Blumhouse soon became a household name in the horror sphere. Chatting at a mixer after the showcase and then again over Zoom in August, BHG creative lead Louise Blain is quick to emphasize just how excited she is to bring Blumhouse’s indie horror know-how to the games industry.
“Horror grows under restraint,” Blain says of the studio’s philosophy. “If you limit things, you can get really exciting horror. That’s how Blumhouse itself grew. It made risky decisions on interesting, creative projects with low budgets. That’s the way we’re going as well. It means we can take risks because they’re smaller games, and it means that we can work on multiple projects.”
BHG’s current plan is to release three games per year for the next three years. While there are other publishers doing great work in the indie space—Devolver Digital and Team17, to name just two—the costs of game development and publishing and the sheer amount of new games fighting for customers’ attention on a monthly basis mean it’s increasingly rare to see big-name labels invest in new IP rather than mining established franchises. Blumhouse has a wealth of the latter to choose from, so why not adapt any of them for a new medium?
“That might sound easy, but actually doing that right is very hard,” Blain says. “It’s not to say we’re never going to work on Blumhouse IP, but it needs to be the absolutely right projects at the right time. You want it to feel authentic and genuine, and everything that someone wants from that.”
Currently, BHG is in the lab cooking up titles like Sleep Awake, described as “a first-person psychedelic horror set in the far future,” where people disappear when they allow themselves to fall asleep; The Simulation, a true crime-inspired mystery about video game design; Crisol: Theater of Idols, a first-person shooter where “the player must sacrifice their own blood to use as ammunition”; and Grave Seasons, the eye-catching pixelated farming-sim murder mystery set in a town stalked by a supernatural serial killer.
But first on the release schedule is Fear the Spotlight, a third-person horror adventure about best friends Vivian and Amy, who sneak into their high school after dark to perform a seance. Naturally, things go terribly wrong, leaving the teen girls trapped inside a nightmare version of the school haunted by sinister forces.
“Fear the Spotlight kind of epitomizes everything we want to say as Blumhouse Games,” Blain says of the three-to-five-hour experience. “It’s got an incredible narrative, great characters, and really amazing-feeling mechanics. It’s genuinely scary, it’s intense. It’s a complete package of everything we want people to know about Blumhouse Games. It ticks every box.”
The short hands-on demo we played at Summer Game Fest was indeed a spooky time that slowly built up the tension. You take control of Viv and follow Amy through the dimly lit corridors of the school, avoiding security cameras on your way to the library for the seance. As you explore, you encounter clues that reveal more about the school’s tragic past and foreshadow what awaits the girls when they’re inevitably transported to a terrifying new realm of reality.
If that synopsis sounds like a blast from the past, the game is, indeed, designed to look and feel like a PlayStation 1 game that’s been locked away in a Blumhouse crypt for decades, biding its time before clawing its way to the surface in 2024. With its polygonal 3D graphics, an atmosphere thick with fog and shadows and heavy film grain, and an emphasis on puzzle solving and environmental storytelling, Fear the Spotlight is heavily influenced by the popular horror games of the late ’90s, particularly Silent Hill and Resident Evil.
“Horror games started for us when we were playing PlayStation games of that era, so we knew we wanted to recreate that look—or, moreso, be inspired by it,” says Bryan Singh, one half of the husband-and-wife team that make up indie studio Cozy Game Pals, the creators of Fear the Spotlight. “It’s us remembering what our favorite games looked like rather than being a very accurate depiction,” adds Crista Castro, the other half of the team.
The decision to harken back to the muddier visuals of the PS1 era when devs used fog as a way to obscure the graphical shortcomings of the day was about more than nostalgia. The visual design fits the psychological horror story Singh and Castro are telling. As the supernatural seeps into familiar surroundings, Viv’s reality becomes harder to pin down.
“The PS1 aesthetic works so well with our game because it makes things ambiguous,” Singh says. “Everything’s a little fuzzy and shimmery. So when you start to see something not quite right, you’re not quite sure you saw it correctly or not.”
Just don’t expect Fear the Spotlight to play exactly like the PS1 titles of yore, as the controls and gameplay of that era feel a bit dated today. The way you interact with the environment and solve puzzles in Fear the Spotlight feels a bit more immersive than the classic games that inspired it.
“All of the puzzles in Fear the Spotlight are very tactile,” Blain says. “They thought about the kind of puzzles that you would find in early Silent Hill but modernized them. It’s like, ‘This is what was so exciting about it. So what different way can we look at that?’”
Everything leads to the seance itself, which is chilling. As you hold down the planchette with Amy, who is sitting across from you, it begins to move across the spirit board on its own. Then, there’s a crack of thunder, a menacing silhouette appears behind your best friend, and Amy disappears into the darkness. You’re left to fumble with the controls as you nervously relight the candles one by one while calling out to Amy in the dark. But you already know she isn’t going to answer you.
It’s an effectively creepy moment, but Blain thinks new players will find a bit of comfort in Fear the Spotlight’s familiar “seance gone wrong” scenario, a way to hook people who have watched The Craft or Goosebumps or Are You Afraid of the Dark? without scaring them off if it’s their first time with a horror game.
“With Fear the Spotlight, we really like to think of it as kind of a gateway horror game,” she says. “You know the setup, you know that things have to go wrong. I love the idea that someone who maybe goes to see M3GAN but didn’t think they were brave enough for a horror game—well, look at Fear the Spotlight, Grave Seasons, and The Simulation.”
The idea, as she pitches it, is that there’s a horror game out there for everybody, and Blumhouse Games wants to bring gamers as many different kinds as it can. In a lightning round toward the end of our chat, Blain briefly touches on some of the other projects in the pipeline.
Blain says of Grave Seasons: “The devs, Perfect Garbage, love farming and cozy games, but they’re also very passionate about horror. This is just the most perfect mashup of those. It’s almost scary how well these two genres go together.”
On The Simulation: “It will really reward your gaming knowledge as you go through these different sorts of digital worlds. I don’t think people have seen anything quite like The Simulation before. It’s really juicy!”
Then there’s the mysterious Project C, which teams filmmaker Brandon Cronenberg (Infinity Pool) with one of the best experimental game developers in the business, Sam Barlow, who’s wowed gamers for years with interactive narrative experiences such as Her Story and Immortality. Blain calls the pairing “a match made in nightmares, just the two perfect brains” but won’t get into any specifics about the title beyond teasing that “it’s going to be dark and scary.”
While the current focus is on making the first six games in the lineup the best they can be, BHG is also keeping an eye out for other exciting opportunities in the space. “The lovely thing is that there is really no shortage of brilliant development teams working on indie horror projects,” Blain says. “We’re getting really interesting pitches approaching us.”
From the development side, Singh and Castro of Cozy Game Pals, who initially self-funded a smaller version of Fear the Spotlight that released on Steam last year before Blumhouse invested in the project to make it even better, certainly see the value of the studio entering the industry. “We’re so excited for what this means for indie developers, that there’s a new studio that people can go to, especially for horror games,” Castro says.
As for what types of projects Blain would like to see come through Blumhouse Games’ door next, she doesn’t have a specific wish list as much as an expectation of the unexpected. “I just want all the horror. I love folk horror, found footage horror. What I’m completely aware of is that someone somewhere will pitch one of those, but it won’t be in the way that I expect, and it’ll be all the better for that. Chances are I think I know what I want, and someone’s going to go, ‘We did this but then we did this to it,’ and I’ll be like, ‘We’ll that’s the perfect horror game!’”
Fear the Spotlight releases on PlayStation and Xbox consoles, Nintendo Switch, and Steam on Oct. 22. You can play a demo on Steam now.
The post Fear the Spotlight and What’s Next for Blumhouse’s Big Jump Into Horror Games appeared first on Den of Geek.
