Summary

  • Blumhouse Productions branching into indie games could revolutionize the horror game genre with unique, low-budget projects.
  • The studio's collaboration with independent developers brings a diverse lineup of horror games catering to different preferences and fear tolerances.
  • By giving visibility to indie horror games, Blumhouse Games may encourage more creative mechanics and subversive genre mashups in the industry.

I’ve been vocal about not being able to play survival horror games because I’m a big baby with a strong survival instinct that makes me fling my controller at oncoming scary things without a second thought, but that doesn’t mean I don’t get excited every time I see a new, interesting horror game. Most recently, Blumhouse Productions’ venture into gaming got me very excited.

I’ve long been fascinated with the horror genre in many different media, and I especially love that there are so many ways to experiment with horror and the different fears that make people tick. Blumhouse Productions understands this. Since the 2010s, the studio has primarily published horror movies in a variety of flavours – the supernatural (Paranormal Activity, Insidious, Sinister), psychological (Oculus, Creep, Cam), and thriller (The Purge, Split) subgenres have all graced its slate of movies.

It’s also produced several non-horror movies like Whiplash, BlacKkKlansman, and Get Out, and while a lot of its projects end up critical and commercial flops, it’s worked on critically lauded, generation-defining movies with real cultural impact. A win is a win, I suppose!

Now, Blumhouse Is Moving Into Indie Games

It was surprising to hear that Blumhouse is now branching out into games, but not that surprising – Blumhouse has dabbled in horror novels, haunted houses, and podcasts in the past, so expanding into this medium isn’t a stretch.

Blumhouse also produced the Five Nights At Freddy’s movie and is reportedly working on an adaptation of Dead By Daylight.

But Blumhouse is doing something very interesting. If the studio was publishing a slate of typical horror games, I would not be as excited as I am now – I’d simply sigh and say, well, here’s another bunch of games I’m never going to play. But much like its wide variety of horror movies catered to people with different tolerances and preferences, Blumhouse has announced six games that all seem very different from one another. That’s by design, as the studio is collaborating with independent developers on games with low budgets, just like it does with its movies.

Each game confronts horror in different ways. Crisol is a first-person religious horror game where you use your own blood as ammo. Fear the Spotlight is an anxiety-inducing, narrative-driven puzzle game that looks straight out of the ‘90s, putting you in the shoes of two teenage girls trying to solve a mystery. Sleep Awake is a first-person psychedelic horror set in the far future, when people mysteriously start vanishing as they sleep in the last city on Earth. Grave Seasons, the game I’m most likely to play because it looks the least terrifying, is a farming and town sim with a twist: one of the town’s residents is a murderer, and if you figure out their MO, maybe you can save the next victim. The most intriguing is Project C – all we know about it right now is that it’s being developed by Sam Barlow, who made Immortality, and Brandon Cronenberg, the son of horror legend David Cronenberg and a talented director in his own right.

Blumhouse Games Could Boost Indie Horror Into The Stratosphere

Some of Blumhouse’s investments in low-budget horror films have paid off majorly, with box office returns massively outweighing filming budgets, and I expect it’s hoping to see the same thing with indie horror games. This is actually one of the best things that could happen for fans of small, weird horror games (me), as well as the people who make them – triple-A gaming is risky and uninventive, but giving indies the potential to burst out on the scene and iterate on familiar genres can only help the game industry, especially since indies are where the most interesting, creative mechanics are created.

Of course, Blumhouse only markets its own games. But having this much publicity and intrigue around the indie horror genre could mean more visibility for other games in the space, whether or not they look like the triple-A horror games most often shown at major showcases. I adore the idea of Grave Seasons in particular, and I love that a game that mashes two popular genres together is being given so much attention.

This means we could get more games like it, that subvert our expectations but also cater to players with different tolerances of horror. For a scaredy cat like me, this is the greatest thing that could happen to the genre. We’ll just have to wait and see if Blumhouse can pull it off.

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