Fear the limelight is hellishly atmospheric from the start, as if you were diving into a wormhole that sends you straight to the set of the cult horror classic of the 90s The craftGrainy, VHS-style graphics, narrative-driven gameplay, and simplistic puzzles are reminiscent of early PlayStation horror titles or point-and-click mystery games for the PC, and the two main characters (Vivian and Amy) look like they’d hang out near the fountain at your local mall, fishnet top and pentagram t-shirt included.
Blumhouse, the horror production studio that has announced that it is moving into gaming on a large scale by Demonstration of five different games during the presentation of the Summer Game Fest 2024, noticed how cool Fear the limelight was on Steam last year and presented the two-person development team (Cozy Game Pals) with the opportunity to expand it. So they pulled it from Valve’s marketplace to flesh it out even more and will release it fully later this year. I had the chance to play a small snippet of the demo at Summer Game Fest and it left an incredible impression that continues to linger even as I go to other hands-on dates.
Fear the limelight takes place in a school at night – a Threshold space straight out of a 4Chan Creepypasta whose creepiness is only enhanced by the game’s VHS grain filter. Vivian and Amy have broken into the school to retrieve a Ouija board from a locked box in the library while a thunderstorm rages outside (I noticed that the sounds of the storm get louder as you get closer to the library windows, a tiny little detail that was a joy to discover). They must hide from the school’s security cameras (Fear the limelight has very simple movement mechanics: walking, jogging, crouching) and collect things that will help you with your seance, similar to what you would do in a resident Evil Game: To get the key to the display case, you must track down a keycard to get into the librarian’s office.
When the girls sit down to begin their séance, you must light the candles on your side of the table with a box of matches, a brief moment that offers an incredibly satisfying tactility. But of course, as soon as Vivian and Amy start meeting with the dead, everything goes wrong – the candles go out, Amy disappears, a fire breaks out. The quiet, slowly smoldering fear Fear the limelight The dread that was brewing during the first two-thirds of my hands-on immediately turns into heart-wrenching fear as you have to run through the library to escape the fire and eventually sprint through a bizarre rift in the fabric of reality.
When my short hands-on test was over, I turned to the Duo development team and simply said: “Fuck yeah.”
Fear the limelight is shaping up to be a brilliant blend of old and new, a clear sign of Blumhouse’s excellent taste. It will be re-released for PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and PC later in 2024. PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, and PC.
