Worry The Highlight is vibey as hell from the outset, like plunging right into a wormhole that sends you straight onto the set of the ‘90s cult horror traditional The Craft. Grainy, VHS-esque visuals, narrative-driven gameplay, and simplistic puzzles are paying homage to early PlayStation horror titles or point-and-click PC mysteries, and the 2 lead characters (Vivian and Amy) appear like they’d be hanging out close to the fountain at your native mall, fishnet prime and pentagram t-shirt included.
Blumhouse, the horror manufacturing studio that introduced it’s delving into video games in an enormous approach by exhibiting off 5 completely different video games through the 2024 Summer time Recreation Fest presentation, observed how cool Worry the Highlight was on Steam final 12 months and supplied the two-person growth workforce (Cozy Recreation Buddies) a possibility to develop it. So, they pulled it from Valve’s market to flesh it out even additional, and can launch it in full later this 12 months. I acquired an opportunity to play somewhat slice of the demo at Summer time Recreation Fest, and it left an unimaginable impression, one which’s lingering whilst I head to different hands-on appointments.
Worry the Highlight is about in a college at evening—a liminal house straight out of a 4Chan creepypasta whose creepiness is barely elevated by the sport’s VHS grain filter. Vivian and Amy have damaged into the college to get a Ouija board out of a locked case within the library whereas a thunderstorm rages exterior (I observed that the sounds of the storm develop louder as you stroll nearer to the library’s home windows, a tiny little element that was a delight to find). You must disguise from the college’s safety cameras (Worry the Highlight has very primary motion mechanics: stroll, jog, crouch) and collect issues to assist facilitate your seance very similar to you would possibly in a Resident Evil recreation: to get the important thing for the show case it’s essential to monitor down a keycard to get into the librarian’s workplace.
As the women sit down to start out their séance, you’ve acquired to gentle the candles in your aspect of the desk with a field of matches, a small second that provides an extremely satisfying tactility. However naturally, as quickly as Vivian and Amy start to convene with the useless, issues go awry—the candles blow out, Amy disappears, a fireplace breaks out. The quiet, slow-burn anxiousness Worry the Highlight was brewing for the primary two-thirds of my hands-on instantly shifts into heart-pounding worry, as you must run by way of the library to flee the hearth and find yourself sprinting by way of a weird tear within the cloth of actuality.
When my transient hands-on ended, I turned to the duo dev workforce and easily mentioned, “Fuck yeah.”
Worry The Highlight is shaping as much as be an excellent melding of outdated and new, a transparent marker of Blumhouse’s wonderful style. It’ll relaunch later in 2024 for PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Swap, and PC. PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Sequence X/S, Nintendo Swap, and PC.
