Fear the Spotlight

The game follows high school students Vivian Singh (Khaya Fraites) and Amy Tanaka (Maganda Marie) as they sneak their way through their school at night after hours to perform a séance only to let an ancient supernatural entity take the form of a stage spotlight (Bryan Singh). As a stealth approach, players must control Vivian or Amy to avoid the spotlight or get killed by the entity.

Booksmart Vivian Singh and goth Amy Tanaka are two high school students and close friends, with Vivian secretly in love with Amy. Amy convinces Vivian to sneak into their high school Sunnyside High, where they use a ouija board in their library to conduct a seance in hopes of communicating with spirits of students who perished in a fire at the school in 1991. During the seance, Amy reveals that she had felt a spirit following her in the halls, before a figure behind her appears, and Amy vanishes. Vivian searches for her around the seemingly changed Sunnyside and finds her, only for Amy to be sucked in a fire that begins consuming the school, forcing Vivian to flee through an opening at the students' memorial.

Vivian finds herself in a decaying, shifting version of Sunnyside in 1991, where she encounters several ghostly spirits and odd puzzles. She discovers several notes from that year about an unpopular student named Chrissy Santos who had a crush on school jock Raoul Rousseau, hoping to get his attention by auditioning for a part in their local production of The Phantom of the Opera. This angered popular girl Heather Moore, the daughter of the superintendent whose influence covered up Heather's bullying. Heather and Raoul won the lead roles, while Chrissy was delegated as an understudy, but gains a secret admirer.

Developer Cozy Game Pals is based in Los Angeles, California. Fear the Spotlight was first announced in April 2022, with a playable demo released the same day. Shortly after release on Steam, Zach Wood and Louise Blain of Blumhouse Games discovered the game after seeing it on Twitter and were impressed by its potential. Blumhouse reached out to the developers, offering to publish the game for consoles, localize it into other languages, and give them an additional year to expand the game, which they accepted. Following this, Blumhouse announced during their line-up from the Summer Game Fest on June 7, 2024, that their first game to publish is an atmospheric horror adventure, Fear the Spotlight, developed by Cozy Game Pals, founded by husband and wife Bryan Singh and Crista Castro.

The game takes inspiration from classic 1990s teen horror stories and cinematic classics such as Phantom of the Opera and The Conjuring, or classic old horror games like Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and Fatal Frame but as a twisted homage/love letter to the "fun horror" the developers made.

Fear the Spotlight received "generally favorable reviews" based on 18 critic reviews according to review aggregator website Metacritic. 87% of critics recommended Fear the Spotlight on OpenCritic.

TheGamer gave the game a positive review on its compelling storytelling and remarkable presentation but lacks the options that makes the challenge trivial for experienced players and stealth sections too obnoxious to handle. Bloody Disgusting also gave a great review as Blumhouse's perfect gateway to the horror game genre from their game division and a 4 out of 5 rating on its heartfelt story with clever tactile puzzles and spooky sequences that never gets too scary, but not as a bad thing. PlayStation Universe gave the game a 9 out of 10 on the incredible atmosphere and the creepy PS1-era style to a great story. Shaun Cichacki of Vice called the game's visual design "incredibly charming and beautiful" and praised the interactivity of the puzzles.