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With a Nineties artwork fashion and controls, Concern The Highlight conjures the creepiness of Resident Evil and Silent Hill, however with an emphasis on the puzzles, slightly than the fight.
By
Phil Hornshaw
on
Fear The Spotlight begins like many good horror tales. A few friends—nerdy goody-goody Vivian and her goth pal Amy—sneak into college after-hours to carry out a séance. The college has a creepy historical past, in spite of everything, due to a hearth a number of years earlier that claimed the lives of a number of college students. It’s kind of morbid and disrespectful to attempt to contact the spirits of a bunch of youngsters within the college library, however hey, youngsters are morbid and disrespectful.
I performed a brief demo of Concern The Highlight at Summer Game Fest 2024’s Play Days event, and at first, that was the factor that caught with me most—at least, at first. Sneaking by means of the halls of the varsity and listening to conversations between protagonist Vivian and Amy, the entire thing felt fairly pure and lifelike. Goth child befriends nerd and the pair get into hassle together—I am positive lots of people have that precise backstory of their lives someplace.
Concern The Highlight matches a Nineties teen horror story with a Nineties survival-horror aesthetic. The sport calls up the look of early 3D video games on the unique PlayStation, most notably Silent Hill. The blocky, low-resolution visuals work effectively with the darkish highschool setting, giving the entire sport an odd unreality that is excellent for a ghost story.
The sport, the product of the two-person, husband-and-wife crew Cozy Sport Friends, launched in a earlier kind again in 2023. It has since been picked up for publishing by Blumhouse Video games, the online game arm of film manufacturing studio Blumhouse, and is re-releasing in Fall 2024 with extra story content material. However regardless of having been round for 9 or so months, Concern The Highlight is not a sport I had clocked earlier than Summer time Sport Fest, and after attempting it for a couple of minutes, I used to be disillusioned I hadn’t heard of it earlier than.
The demo began with Vivian and Amy making their method by means of the halls and heading towards the library. Alongside the best way was a fast stealth section, by which the ladies ducked below a desk to keep away from the scanning eye of a surveillance digital camera. That may be the highlight from the title, with staying within the shadows to keep away from being seen being a significant gameplay aspect.
Once we get to the library, we see the opposite main gameplay aspect: first-person puzzle-solving. Vivian units off to retrieve a spirit board (in any other case referred to as a Ouija board), which is stored in a glass show case within the library. To get it open, Vivian wants a key from the library’s workplace; to get into the workplace, she wants a keycard. Every time she interacts with a kind of parts, the sport cuts from a third-person perspective to first-person. You information a cursor round a static model of the glass case to seek out the elements you possibly can transfer or work together with. Touching the show’s lock, for instance, brings up Vivian’s stock to decide on an merchandise to make use of with it, like a key.
These interactive moments additionally offer you alternatives to study extra in regards to the world round you. Like in Resident Evil or Silent Hill, hitting the activation button on any of the opposite objects within the case brings up a bit of little bit of textual content about them, giving a few of Vivian’s inner monologue about no matter she’s seeing or studying. A few of these moments are fairly insightful, giving a greater sense of Vivian and Amy’s relationship. Concern The Highlight appears to sport a excessive diploma of consideration to element in offering little tidbits that improve your understanding of the story. As an illustration, when Vivian retrieves the keycard from the data desk, we uncover simply how massive a nerd Vivian actually is—it’s her personal keycard, as a result of she’s one of many library’s prime pupil volunteers.
Vivian brings the spirit board to a desk the place Amy is ready, the place there’s one other little bit of first-person interactivity. When Amy passes you a e-book of matches, you pull a pair out of your stock and light-weight the candles to begin the séance. Putting your cursor over the planchette and holding a button down simulates the best way you’d work together with the spirit board in actual life, however as Amy begins to ask questions, it begins to maneuver across the board erratically. A darkish determine seems behind Amy and the candles exit, plunging the room into pitch darkness.
From right here, Concern The Highlight takes a drastic flip, even for such a brief demo. I relight the candles slowly and painfully, dragging each from the match field individually. When the sunshine is lastly restored, it reveals that Amy is gone. Vivian grabs a candle to mild the best way, and you can begin to stroll by means of the library in quest of your misplaced pal.
Even within the darkness, it quickly turns into clear that the library has modified. First, it is the trail again the best way you got here, with bookshelves turned over to dam the best way. Then, it begins to look just like the library itself has shifted to change into bigger and extra winding. The house itself feels too massive. That is one other level when the old-school PlayStation graphics amplify the weirdness of Concern the Highlight. Checking down one pathway or one other, you usually see—or assume you see—a determine within the darkness. Different occasions, you are undoubtedly chasing Amy by means of the stacks, however she by some means disappears within the unnatural house. Though there are a whole lot of creepy issues occurring, in accordance with the press supplies shared for the sport, the spooks you may get from Concern The Highlight are atmospheric—no bounce scares to fret about right here, if these aren’t your factor.
As Vivian calls to Amy and continues the search, a distant space of purple mild seems and a silhouette inside it, however as we get shut it vanishes, and out of the blue, fireplace spreads by means of the library.
At this level, Concern The Highlight is off the rails. We hurry by means of the library fleeing the hearth, however the room has totally twisted, bookshelves and tables giving method to completely different partitions. Purple curtains dangle forward, recalling the extradimensional Purple Room of the TV present Twin Peaks. As Vivian flees, the wall forward cracks open, tearing by means of the memorial plaque for the scholars killed within the fireplace, making a pathway. Vivian flees into the crack and the digital camera hangs again, specializing in the scholars’ photos—the faces have shifted from smiling college students to screaming demons.
It is there that Concern The Highlight’s demo ends, giving simply sufficient of a way of Concern The Highlight to be actually attractive. Whereas it is not sporting the form of depth the survival-horror video games it is channeling have been recognized for, the uncanny feeling created by the sport’s graphical fashion and artwork path pair completely with the spooky story the characters discover themselves in. The demo wasn’t fairly sufficient to get a full deal with on all the things Concern The Highlight has to supply, however it did depart me eager to see extra.
Concern The Highlight is about for its re-release with an extra one to 2 hours of recent content material, in accordance with its Steam page, in 2024. It is coming to PC, PlayStation 4, PS5, Nintendo Swap, Xbox Collection X|S, and Xbox 360.
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