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 means by exhibiting off 5 completely different video games in the course of the 2024 Summer season Sport Fest presentation, seen how cool Worry the Highlight was on Steam final 12 months and provided the two-person improvement staff (Cozy Sport Friends) 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 received an opportunity to play a bit slice of the demo at Summer season Sport Fest, and it left an unbelievable impression, one which’s lingering whilst I head to different hands-on appointments.
Worry the Highlight is ready in a faculty at evening—a liminal house 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 college to get a Ouija board out of a locked case within the library whereas a thunderstorm rages outdoors (I seen 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 important to cover from the college’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 may in a Resident Evil sport: 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 received to gentle the candles in your facet 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 concern, as it’s important to run by way of the library to flee the fireplace and find yourself sprinting by way of a weird tear within the material of actuality.
When my transient hands-on ended, I turned to the duo dev staff 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 Collection X/S, Nintendo Swap, and PC.