Grab your Ouija board: behind Fear the Spotlight’s 90s-inspired horror

In 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Crista Castro and Bryan Singh were moved to think about what they really wanted from their lives. An animation director and programmer respectively, the couple had worked on other people’s cartoons and video games at big studios for years, but both had nursed ambitions to make something of their own. They had collaborated on weekend projects here and there, but felt if they really wanted to make a game together, they’d have to quit their jobs. So in 2021, galvanised by lockdown-induced introspection, that’s what they did, forming a husband-and-wife development team under the name Cozy Game Pals . And just to raise the stakes further, they became parents at around the same time.

They gave themselves two years. At the end of it, in 2023, they had made something: a short game called Fear the Spotlight, a 90s-inspired horror adventure that looks like a lost PlayStation classic and feels like a teen ghost movie. They released it on Steam, to a very positive reception from the few people who played it – but they didn’t know how to market it, and it didn’t sell much. “We were like, OK, I guess that was it,” Bryan tells me. “Let’s go find jobs again. And then Blumhouse showed up.”

Yes, that Blumhouse, the very successful horror movie production company founded by Jason Blum. It was gearing up to launch its game publishing label , and the people in charge thought that Fear the Spotlight had potential. “They said, ‘Hey, we found your game, and we think it’s really special. How can we help you?’ It was a very open offer,” Bryan says. “They understood our game so deeply: they’re through-and-through horror fans, so they understood all the references and inspirations that found their way into our game. We got excited about working on it again, and it led us to a ton of ideas of what we could do if we had more time.”

So Blumhouse took the game on, and now here they are, a few months away from releasing an expanded version of their retro horror project. I played the opening scenes, in which teen pals Vivian (nerd) and Amy (goth) sneak into their high-school library late at night, steal a Ouija board from a display, and conduct an impromptu seance. Unsurprisingly, this doesn’t go well, and Amy is stolen away by a vengeful monster, leaving Vivian to creep through the school and try to escape.

Fear the Spotlight is very atmospheric. That low-poly look and the minimalist sound-effects create an uncanny eeriness, like a thing half remembered. Castro introduced Singh to the horror genre, and now they’re both longtime fans. “It’s got some aspects of Fatal Frame, Resident Evil, Silent Hill, not just horror games but also movies,” Crista says. “Are You Afraid of the Dark, Goosebumps, The Ring – all the things that scared me as a kid and a teenager.” The pace is quite slow – you won’t be fumbling with a controller to shoot or fight things here – so unlike in those 90s horror games, you won’t get stuck. Singh and Castro wanted to make a game that all their horror-movie-loving friends could play, particularly the ones that don’t usually play a lot of video games.

I recognised a lot from games such as Resi and Silent Hill even in the opening scenes: the way that books and keys rotate slowly on the screen when you pick them up, the deliberate movement, even the fonts. But as Bryan points out, that’s kind of the point. “A lot of the fun of horror is understanding some of the tropes, building some expectations, and then seeing if those expectations play out the way you want them to,” he says. “Or if, instead, they get twisted in a fun way.”

• Fear the Spotlight is released this autumn on PlayStation 5 and PC

• This interview with Cozy Game Pals took place at Summer game fest in Los Angeles. Keza MacDonald’s travel and accommodation expenses were met by Amazon Games