You are a teenage girl in love with another girl for the first time—your best friend. You don’t know if she loves you back or even likes you that way. The weight of the entire world is on your shoulders.

Horror has always had the unique advantage of exploring more complex themes than other genres can ever dream of achieving. Thanks to metaphor, creepy crawlies and things that go bump in the night can be vivid representations of ideas such as queer identity, trauma and mental health. Fear the Spotlight encapsulates and delivers on these themes better than any indie horror game has in quite some time.

Fear the Spotlight follows a teenager by the name of Vivian who visits her high school after hours with her best friend Amy. The only reason she agrees to go on this very odd impromptu mission late at night, engaging with an Ouija board in the library, is that she harbours a gigantic crush on Amy. With a letter in her possession that confesses all of her feelings that she intends on giving her at the end of the night, Vivian’s night is turned upside down when the Ouija ritual separates the pair and sees the high school transformed and not like it once was. On a dangerous and late-night journey, Vivian must reunite with and save her crush come the break of dawn.

What follows is a textbook horror mood setting as Vivian walks the haunted linoleum high school floors lined with lockers. Fear the Spotlight taps into the anxiety, fear and creeping dread that a closeted teenager may have. Amy is trepidatiously walking through a crumbling hellscape version of the school she’s come to know day in and day out, though, as the title of the game may suggest, it feels like all eyes are on her. Dimly lit hallways will feature shadowy silhouettes with glowing eyes, staring at you. Before you can even get a second glance at them and truly confirm what you’re seeing is real, the figures will move around corners and in cracks in the wall, out of sight. This is how Fear the Spotlight keeps you on edge; it’s never gory or violent. Assailants won’t jump at you, grab you, and shake the camera in fail states. You’re simply never truly relaxed and always nervously anticipating what’s next.

This feeling of all eyes on you only amplifies with the main boss, who regularly comes to haunt Vivian. A humanoid figure with a giant spotlight for a head, they dominate rooms where you’re trying to complete objectives. If you step into their light, damage is taken and it can be fatal. Suddenly you’re ducking under tables and behind piled-up boxes, averting their gaze by all means necessary.  This is another example of the excellent visual metaphor found within Fear the Spotlight. All of this felt like a tidal wave, hitting excellently all too close to home.

As a now-out and proud trans queer woman who growing up went to an all-male Catholic high school, I too felt all eyes on me, daring me to step out of line or show my side where I didn’t submit. I was a reserved bookworm like Vivian, trying not to garner too much attention to myself. Now, I’m more of a combination of her and Amy, a fiery and more defiant version of myself but still tender to this day. As someone who has played a lot of horror games at this point, often starring male protagonist number 283 who is mourning his dead wife or missing a child, I’m only really finally now being represented in the horror genre. It’s an exciting feeling as someone more or less raised by the genre. I have a tattoo of Scream‘s Ghostface on my wrist for Christ’s sake! Finally, I have a horror game experience where I’m the final girl!

The game is presented in a low poly art style reminiscent of late PS1 and early PS2 horror games like Silent Hill or early Resident Evil. Aka, some of the best of the best. It’s immensely effective and fitting for the mood and setting of Fear the Spotlight too. You’re exploring a dilapidated environment in a ’90s setting. What better way to do so than emulating games’ art styles and fidelity at the time? There are sequences where I’m walking through dark hallways with scarce other than a flashlight in hand to lead the way. I’m squinting and on edge through the CRT-style visual noise grain, I’m seeing onscreen, awaiting whatever horrid thing awaits at any corner. This only ever so slightly lets up in areas where the deliberate visual distortion will occasionally have smaller assets’ image flicker or clothing on a character will clip through a model.

Fear the Spotlight was originally about two hours long if you’re relatively quick at working out what you’re doing. Now, this bonus story doubles that and puts my playtime near the four-hour mark. Where the original felt a little breezy and too fast, the new epilogue story frankly makes the entire experience one of the best-paced horror games I’ve ever played. Nothing is glossed over anymore. I finally have more context and answers for all the questions I once had. It doesn’t narratively overdo it or hold your hand either; each theme, idea or narrative beat is explored just the right amount and then it moves on before anything truly drags. Just a little bit more juice in the already well-oiled machine. Again, no spoilers here, but there’s more to Vivian and Amy’s story and the greater overarching mystery. I’d struggle to find someone disappointed in what awaits there.

The puzzles also help the experience feel well-paced and streamlined. They’re not overcomplicated. You don’t have to backtrack all that much to find the missing thread of a puzzle but they’re also not simply laid out right in front of you. They require just the right amount of thought and reflection without leaving you stumped all that long. Sometimes it’s simply finding the right crank for a door. Sometimes these are accompanied by riddles that hint at which order (and how) to interact with a given puzzle. Then a eureka moment happens in your brain and you only have to recall or visit a poster you witnessed just one room back to have the final piece of information linked together. In the follow-up campaign, these vary a bit further and have you making phone calls on your mobile phone, undergoing lockpicking mechanics, recalling radio stations on a boombox and more.

I’m glad I now played the game on PS5 too; thanks to the built-in speaker of the Dualsense controller, apt noises amidst puzzle-solving erupted through my controller. When I’m doing each slow turn of a crank for a pipe, the metal creaks and groans. When I’m plying nails from a wood to gain access to a new area, I hear the wood splintering as it eventually gives way. Combine this with the fact it does the tried and true classic survival-horror puzzle trope of zooming into a close-up first-person perspective when you’re solving these and suddenly it’s some of the most engaging to resolve and also some of the most tactile puzzles I’ve ever experienced in games.

Fear the Spotlight has had so many meaningful changes that if you asked me to point to more issues I’d be splitting hairs. Its boss and enemy encounters could have been a bit more exciting than poking in and out between covers. I’m not asking for fully-fledged melee or gun combat because that’d be ridiculous and incongruent with the game but a little more thought could’ve gone into how to make them more involved. Perhaps the ability to throw objects or create distractions could’ve aided in the flailing feeling you sometimes get when an encounter arena is tasking you to get to a certain corner while the Spotlight boss seems to be lingering there a little too long. At the end of the day, it’s not the worst, it’s perfectly serviceable.

As you’ll come to learn through the story, Vivian and Amy are two sides of the same coin. They represent different but also similar facets of the survival horror protagonist market that I’ve been dying to see. Their story is incredibly important, heartening and triumphant come its conclusion. They’re also just incredibly likable and adorable; whenever they do share scenes and friendly banter despite being quite different people (but outsider misfits all the same) you’re charmed and feel the chemistry. It helped catapult Fear the Spotlight into some of my favourites of the indie horror space and helped me largely cast any small grievance with the game aside. Seriously, how many indie horror experiences have a queer teenager who’s also a POC at the forefront and have it feel as authentic and monumental as this? I can’t think of any!