Cozy Game Pals’ Bryan Singh & Crista Castro on Fear the Spotlight – Interview Series

Fear the Spotlight, the highly anticipated horror game with rich infusions of PSX-inspired visuals and classic Goosebumps-like tropes, has just launched on PC and consoles to a staggering amount of positive feedback and top-tier reviews. Suffice it to say, the revival of old school horror is alive and kicking, and it’s thanks to both Cozy Game Pals and Blumhouse Games that we’ve finally got a new torchbearer to marvel over in time for the Halloween festivities.

To learn more about Fear the Spotlight ahead of its physical release, I decided to speak with the team over at Cozy Game Pals.

The planchet has been cast; Fear the Spotlight is, after months of keeping us on tenterhooks, available to purchase on consoles and PC. Needless to say, we have plenty that we would like to discuss with you about the latest horror. For starters, there’s the premise. Please could you tell us a bit more about it?

Fear the Spotlight is a horror coming of age story about two friends, Vivian and Amy, who sneak into their school at night to perform a seance. Things, unsurprisingly, go wrong and Amy goes missing. It’s up to Vivian to find and rescue her friend and unravel the mystery to a tragedy several decades past.

Fear the Spotlight certainly reignites that faithful spirit of PSX horror  — and we’re all for it! With that said, we would love to hear more about the works that inspired this choice of design. Could you tell us about the steps you took to create this world?

Thanks so much! We wear our influences heavily on our sleeves. Fear the Spotlight is really a mash-up of all our favorite horror games, movies, and TV shows. Our biggest game inspirations were Silent Hill, Resident Evil, and Fatal Frame. For movies & TV, we were inspired by Goosebumps, Are You Afraid of the Dark, The Craft, The Haunting of HIll House – the list goes on and on! In addition to our retro/horror influences, we wanted to make sure the game is as easy to play as a modern action-adventure game.

Sunnyside High clearly has its share of environmental curveballs and other puzzle-centric molehills. Mind telling us a bit more about the challenges that we’ll be dealing with in Fear the Spotlight?

We really cared about making an experience that not only played well, but was compelling you to keep seeing what’s next. Often in horror, when you are shown something too often or something gets repetitive, things stop feeling scary. That meant creating new and unique bespoke puzzles and environments to keep surprising the player, which is a lot of work for a team of two. It was challenging, but well worth the effort! You’re constantly switching between solving puzzles, exploring the haunted school, sneaking past threats, unraveling the backstory, encountering ghosts, and there’s even a few bombastic set piece moments.

Do you have any words of wisdom for those who’ve yet to pick up a copy of Fear the Spotlight? Any tips or tricks that might aid their efforts, perhaps?

The game isn’t over until you hit the credits scroll!

Suffice it to say, having Blumhouse Games involved is a huge deal. Do you have any plans to collaborate with the production giant in the foreseeable future for any other projects outside of Fear the Spotlight?

It definitely was a huge deal! Both of us are interested in a ton of genres outside of horror, so we can’t promise our next project will be horror based. It’s more important to us to find what we are most excited about and  start from there. If that idea happens to be a horror game, we would love to pitch it to Blumhouse! They have been such ideal partners and we loved working with them, and would happily do it again.

Not only has Fear the Spotlight received a fantastic reception, but we're also teaming up with @iam8bit for a physical edition! pic.twitter.com/WcDr2aDE0x

— Blumhouse Games (@BlumhouseGames) October 28, 2024

While we’re on the subject of potential collaborations and projects, mind if we ask what it is that you’re looking to accomplish next? If you’ve another concept in mind, we would love to hear more about it!

We have a lot of ideas we are playing around with! We are taking the time to explore each one to see which is the most exciting to us. Hopefully we can share them soon!

How can we stay up to date with Fear the Spotlight and other news stories from the Cozy Game Pals team? Are we able to share any social feeds, newsletters, or event details with our readers?

We are @cozygamepals on Bluesky, Twitter, and Instagram!

Would you like to add anything to the page before we go ahead and close the book?

A physical release is coming in 2025 in partnership with iam8bit, and thanks for having us!

Thank you for taking the time to speak with us!

You can check in with Cozy Game Pals’ X channel for more information here. Alternatively, you can add the game to your wishlist on Steam for additional updates here.