With its first few games now published or revealed, it seems the label is walking that path

Horror Games From Blumhouse Will Follow A Familiar Pattern

With its first few games now published or revealed, it seems the label is walking that path

"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.

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