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) seem like they’d be hanging out close to the fountain at your native mall, fishnet high and pentagram t-shirt included.
Blumhouse, the horror manufacturing studio that introduced it’s delving into video games in a giant manner by displaying off 5 totally different video games through the 2024 Summer time Sport Fest presentation, observed how cool Worry the Highlight was on Steam final 12 months and provided the two-person improvement crew (Cozy Sport Buddies) a chance 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 bought an opportunity to play somewhat slice of the demo at Summer time Sport Fest, and it left an unimaginable impression, one which’s lingering at the same time as I head to different hands-on appointments.
Worry the Highlight is ready in a faculty at night time—a liminal area straight out of a 4Chan creepypasta whose creepiness is just elevated by the sport’s VHS grain filter. Vivian and Amy have damaged into the varsity to get a Ouija board out of a locked case within the library whereas a thunderstorm rages outdoors (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). It’s a must to disguise from the varsity’s safety cameras (Worry the Highlight has very fundamental motion mechanics: stroll, jog, crouch) and collect issues to assist facilitate your seance very like you would possibly in a Resident Evil recreation: to get the important thing for the show case it’s good to observe down a keycard to get into the librarian’s workplace.
As the ladies sit down to start out their séance, you’ve bought to gentle the candles in your facet of the desk with a field of matches, a small second that gives an extremely satisfying tactility. However naturally, as quickly as Vivian and Amy start to convene with the lifeless, issues go awry—the candles blow out, Amy disappears, a hearth 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 concern, as it’s important to run by means of the library to flee the hearth and find yourself sprinting by means of a weird tear within the material of actuality.
When my transient hands-on ended, I turned to the duo dev crew and easily stated, “Fuck yeah.”
Worry The Highlight is shaping as much as be a superb melding of previous and new, a transparent marker of Blumhouse’s glorious style. It’ll relaunch later in 2024 for PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Change, and PC. PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Collection X/S, Nintendo Change, and PC.