Last year, the horror film titans at Blumhouse announced a video games label and brought its first game as a publisher, Fear The Spotlight, to Summer Game Fest. I eventually reviewed that one and found it to be a worthy entry-level horror game. It was creepy, but not overly scary, and made for a reasonable gateway into the genre for younger or less experienced players. At Summer Game Fest 2025, Blumhouse showed off two more games that, while perhaps not specifically for beginners, do well to express Blumhouse Games’ publishing vision.
Grave Seasons and Crisol: Theater of Idols are each horror games, but couldn’t be more different otherwise. The former is 2D, the latter is 3D. Grave Seasons is presented in third-person, while Crisol is played in first-person. Grave Seasons is also a dark twist on farming sims, whereas Crisol blends elements of recent Resident Evil games with BioShock, all set in a world inspired by Spanish art and folklore. Blumhouse brought these two games to Summer Game Fest 2025, giving me a preview of what’s to come from a publisher that is technically still in its infancy, but also carries the name recognition and reputation of one of modern horror’s biggest brands.
In the movie world, it feels like one out of every two horror films displays Blumhouse’s logo in their opening moments. While I’m sure that’s not literally true, it’s certainly the case that the production company has its hands in all kinds of horror productions, from major series like The Conjuring and Paranormal Activity to legendary one-offs like Get Out and 2020’s remake of The Invisible Man. The prospect of the company getting into horror video games is an exciting one for me, as I hope the publisher can use a keen eye to lift notable projects out of obscurity.
“We have this internal saying: ‘We’re making all different flavors of horror games for everyone,’ Blumhouse’s Ara Josefsson told me after my demos with the publisher’s SGF 2025 slate. “People think of horror, and maybe they have a very siloed perception of what that would be based on where they come from. Is it body horror? Is it jump scares? But there’s actually a pretty big spectrum of what horror games are. I think our future games will impress upon that as well.”
In addition to Grave Seasons and Crisol, Blumhouse has already announced several future games. Sleep Awake is a first-person horror adventure from the interesting pairing of Spec Ops: The Line’s director Cory Davis and Nine Inch Nails’ guitarist Robin Finck about a dystopian world without sleep. The Simulation is a VR title about investigating a horror game not known to have existed before. Project C, admittedly the one I’m personally most excited about, is the next Sam Barlow game, and this time he’s enlisted Brandon Cronenberg for what is likely to be something gruesome, if the latter’s filmography is a reliable clue about the mysterious game.
Grave Seasons’ pitch is perhaps the most compelling of the whole list so far, though. The game’s Stardew-like setup soon gives way to a violent murder–and a murder mystery follows. Blending the gameplay elements of something like a Stardew Valley with a story about a serial killer seems poised to toy with the genre’s usual romance angles and gamified friendships. I’m eager to see how the game might spin the neighborhood cast of characters into a whodunnit.
Crisol’s art style was impressive, too, and I’m most looking forward to playing this one in the developers’ native language, Spanish, once it releases. The gunplay was rough in my demo, as aiming down sights proved to be unreliable, but I’m hoping that gets improved before it releases later this year. Making up for that roughness was the game’s clever wrinkle: You reload your gun with your own blood, so you’ll have to balance your ammo against your own health. In my time with the game, I found myself having to combat my habit of reloading after every encounter, which added a challenging layer to the game.
There are two things I’ve found to be true about horror fans: rarely do they like just one kind of horror, and often they’re obsessive about the genre. Blumhouse isn’t the only games label pulling diverse, smaller-sized horror projects into the limelight–DreadXP has been doing it for years and Critical Reflex is a new label showing signs of similar intentions–but like Annapurna does for weird (complimentary) art games, Blumhouse’s name recognition does some heavy lifting for the horror games it signs. Even if, like Blumhouse’s movies, they don’t all prove to be winners, I’m looking forward to experimenting with whatever projects they reveal for the foreseeable future.
