At Summer Game Fest, Blumhouse Games revealed a whole slate of horror games it’s publishing in the near future, as the horror film studio turns its eye toward a new medium. The games shown off include Sam Barlow’s upcoming horror game titled Project C which is being made in collaboration with Brandon Cronenberg.
Blumhouse came to Summer Game Fest with a sizzle reel that showed off a huge variety of horror games that ran the gamut from first-person horror shooters to what appeared to be a farming game with a horror twist.
Crisol: Theater of Idols was up first and appears to be a first-person shooter from Vermila Studios. It is the team’s debut game and seems to take inspiration from the darker aspects of 20th century Spanish folklore. Players will have to use their own blood as ammunition against the forces of evil lurking in this nightmare rendition of Spain. Crisol looks appropriately gory, but the creepiest thing about the game is easily the giant puppets seemingly chasing after you the whole time.
Grave Seasons has been billed as a “supernatural murder-mystery farming simulator,” and appears to be blending aspects of cozier genres with an unsettling serial killer twist. You are the new farmer in town, and must cultivate friendships (and maybe even love) as you build up your business, but the whole time, you must also uncover which member of your community is a serial killer murdering the others.
Sleep Awake, from developer EYES OUT, comes by way of a surprising collaboration between the director of Spec Ops: The Line and Robin Finck of the band Nine Inch Nails. It’s a first-person adventure title that looks exactly as trippy and out of this world as you might expect from the talent behind the game. Sleep Awake takes place in a far-off future where people are disappearing in their sleep, and those who don’t disappear have to survive the death cults of the last city on Earth.
Fear the Spotlight, a “creepy love letter to classic 90s teen horror stories” from Cozy Game Pals, is a horror game with a retro presentation in which friends break into a school after hours, solve a decades-old mystery, and try to survive the night. The Simulation, from Playmestudio, is a horror game about a video game that is found at the scene of a crime. You play a game designer who plumbs the depths of the never-before-seen game for clues as to what happened.
Finally, though we’ve known about Project C from Sam Barlow and Half-Mermaid Studio for a while, details have largely been scarce. They still are, but at Summer Game Fest, we did get news that the game is being made with the help of Brandon Cronenberg, the director of Infinity Pool and the son of the renowned horror director David Cronenberg.
Altogether, Blumhouse seems to be making major moves into games, and with an exciting lineup like this, I’m looking forward to seeing how they make waves in one of gaming’s most popular genres.
