You know, when it comes to horror games I appreciate it when developers are able to get right down to business. While Fear the Spotlight has just a little exploration right at the start to get you up to speed and comfortable with what few base mechanics it has, mostly how to crouch and try to avoid being detected by a security camera, it then wastes little time setting the stage for things to go wrong. Namely two teenage girls sneaking into a school library that had been restored after a fire that killed multiple students, and think it would be a great idea to do a seance with a ouija board. Not surprisingly, given the genre, things pretty quickly go wrong.

What follows is pretty well a roller coaster of tension and release, puzzle solving and exploration, and a fair amount of catching glimpses of sinister figures keeping an eye on you. Where puzzles are concerned, my expectation in this space has been dragged down by too many poorly-implemented control schemes and poorly-conceived designs. Thankfully, Fear the Spotlight has managed to not only turn around my expectations, but pretty well set a standard for others to aspire to. You’ll generally need to search around for what you need, but for the most part even if perhaps a bit elaborate they all make contextual sense within their settings and are approachable. Also, while I wouldn’t consider the game particularly scary compared to many of its peers, there is a particular entity you’ll need to be concerned with whose design ties to the game’s title and helps put your early lessons on being stealthy to some use.

Now, even a cursory glance of the game’s look will likely have people thinking back to the early PS1 and N64 days, with relatively simple geometry, pretty primitive textures, and a fair amount of mild haze everywhere you look. While this sort of throwback to the original Resident Evil days would normally prompt some eye rolling and trepidation on my part, since so often games adopting this style tend to do things poorly, in this case I did find it to be effective in helping to set the mood. There just seems to be an intent and care here in making that look work well, rather than it simply being a shortcut to be exploited. While maybe it lacks in shock value and intense scares, Fear the Spotlight does manage to slowly get under your skin, providing some great tension, but then delivering enough well-executed gameplay to make it work as more than a seasonal cash-in.