Layers of Fear
Bloober Team’s bundle of horror returns, with impressive graphics and solid scary moments, but clumsy storytelling and technical issues dampen the series' curtain call.
‘Things that go bump in the night’ is the Fruit Loops of horror, tickling those fear sensors in the moment and giving those of us who relish even the cheapest thrills those little frissons of euphoria that we crave.
And like Fruit Loops, this kind of horror works best when used sparingly, rather than as a sustainable form of nutrition over the long run. Think about quintessential night-bumpy horror movies like The Conjuring; the actual scares are pretty sporadic—a few moments across 90 minutes, really—with tons of fakeouts, drama, and buildup in between.
To its credit, Layers of Fear does actually break its jump-scares up quite well, and playing this definitive-edition-remake-bundle puts that into perspective.Layers of Fearhas been described as a ghost train—a series of silly scares on a pretty linear path—but these games are just as much walking sims, where you uncover the story through notes, items, and enough on-the-nose symbolism to give Freud an aneurysm. It’s always been competent, if a little overeggy, on both the horror and story fronts.
Another thing that this bundle puts into perspective, however, is that with each successive entry or DLC, the series’ creativity seemed to diminish, with most of the new content added to this really bringing it home that the Layers of Fear concept has well and truly run its course. Honestly, developer Bloober Team moved onto bigger and better things, and I’m sure that it’s subsequent games like Observer and The Medium, rather than Layers, that convinced Konami to give these guys the Silent Hill 2 Remake gig.
So what exactlyisthis iteration of Layers of Fear? Well, it’s an intriguingly constructed definitive edition of the whole series. Remade in Unreal Engine 5, It bundles together Layers of Fear 1 and 2, bridging them via athirdstory about a writer in a lighthouse writing up the stories of both those games. On the side, you can also play the Inheritance DLC for the first game, as well as an all-new DLC, the Final Note, which tells the first game’s story from the wife’s perspective. With each story covering the descent into madness of a different thespian craft—painter, actor, musician, writer—the circle of psychedelic symbolism-heavy horror is now complete.
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Layers of Fear can be a dazzling game, bolstered by power gloss and power of Unreal Engine 5. The first game in particular, is a hell of a visual trip, playing constant tricks of perspective and space to make the house disorienting, maddening, and a nice representation of the artist’s unfurling mind. Looping corridors will suddenly emerge onto an ominous chandelier-lit passageway, paintings will shift and warp before your eyes, and sometimes you might look up in a certain room to see an infinite twisting stretch of painting and wood paneling stretching off into the darkness above. Visually and aesthetically, Layers of Fear has still very much ‘got it.’
The first game in particular looksgorgeous, impressive not only in the trippy vistas but in the thick clutter and tiny details of this grandiose Victorian mansion. It’s a joy just looking at all the trinkets, child toys, paintings, and even the wallpaper, though you’re constantly paranoid that if you look too closely, a painting’s face might disfigure, the wallpaper might start swirling like they would when you start coming up off a healthy dose of magic mushrooms, or you might turn around to find yourself in a completely different place to where you thought you were.
But that richness diminishes with each subsequent entry. The Inheritance DLC is still pretty solid, as you play the artist and musician’s daughter who goes back to her childhood home and relives various memories from the perspective of a toddler and child. The gigantic fish-eye perspective of everything when you play the toddler looks great, and there are some inventive sequences that put you into dark little worlds of cardboard cutouts and fairytales.
Layers of Fear 2, casting you (hur-hur)as an actor working for a mysterious director aboard an ocean liner, is way less of a trip, both in the psychedelic and pacing sense. While it has some interesting set-pieces that evoke scenes and imagery from classical Hollywood and the early years of cinema, its setting is mundane by comparison, it lacks scares, andgoddamdo get I get bored of those mannequins being used as storytelling devices (they basically fit thedreary ‘ghostly flashback’ means of storytelling I rambled about before). Whether it’s through the director or flashbacks, the gamereallylikes talking to you while you stand there and listen; compared to the pretty tactile original, it feels like a horror presentation.
I quite enjoyed the newly introduced writer stuff, where you play a woman who—in writing books about the stories of Layers of Fear 1 and 2—herself seems to succumb to the mysterious ‘rat queen’ painting from the first game. It’s very much a bridging story though, and neither the environment nor the story really rise up to becoming fully fleshed-out in and of themselves.
The new Final Note DLC, meanwhile, lasts maybe 90 minutes, yet manages to feelreallyslow. Narratively, it has a novel hook, as you, playing as the painter’s physically and mentally scarred wife, are trying to break free of the house and your narcissistic shitbag of a husband. This is neatly represented through the house being entirely bound in chains, which you slowly break down by progressing through the story. Sadly, it quickly loses its lustre when you realise that the chains are the sole visual gimmick of the entire DLC, and the puzzles—while not terribly complex—are overly long and don’t match the original game in terms of visuals or mechanics.
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Crucially, the Final Note is low on scares, relying almost entirely on what I imagine will be this remake’s most contentious addition: the ability to fight the pursuing ghost of the painter’s wife by going all Alan Wake and shining a light at it. Yep, just focus that beam and the ghost that you were utterly helpless against in the original game collapses into a pile of goop, giving you a good 5-10 seconds before she recongeals.
Not only is this the main hook of the Final Note DLC, but they redesigned parts of the original Layers of Fear to accommodate these chasey-lighty-fighty sequences too. It’s a weird call. In the original Layers of Fear, the ghost’s presence was mostly teasing—popping up at the peripheries of your vision, backlit at the end of a long corridor, or at the other end of a courtyard when you look out the window. There were only a few points where the ghost could actually ‘get’ you, and that was usually down to making wrong moves or decisions rather than it chasing you down. It may seem odd to say of a game that is itching to spook you every 20 seconds with a giggling doll running across your screen, a glass breaking, or a door creaking open ahead of you, but when it came to the big bad ghost herself, Bloober Team showed some restraint in the original game, which has now been stripped away with this design change.
Now, I like a good chase sequence (I’m jumping back into Outlast Trials tonight with a couple of the DS crew, in fact), but itreallyundermines the chase when you can just turn around, point your light at the thing, and basically keep it pacified. You spend too much time looking at the threat rather than running from it, you become too familiar with the threat, and of course you have a weapon that means the threat’s notreallythat much of a threat. It’s an unnecessary addition that somewhat derails the first (and best) game’s ghost train, turning the ghost into something tangible, fightable, and predictable rather than mysterious and ominous. These sequences aren’t helped by the ghost’s very limited loop of dialogue, which seems to just says“Where is… Get out”on repeat.
In a narrative sense too, it’s a bit boggling that you encounter the ghost of the painter’s wife even when you play as the wife, and while I’m sure you’re able to do all kinds of mental gymnastics to say that the ghost isn’tliterallythe wife, but a representation of the collapse of their relationship (yada-yada), the reality is that after completing the base game, I was desperately tired of those ghost sequences (which always went on for too long as I’d get lost in the ever-shifting corridors). I was really hoping that the DLC would mix it up a bit. If the ghost isn’t literal, then perhaps it would’ve been a cool twist for the wife to see thehusbandas the ghost/horror (and considering what a dictatorial bastard he is, it would’ve been a fitting way to wrap up the story).
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At its best, this edition of Layers of Fear is still capable of some solid spooks, enhanced by some lovely graphics courtesy of Unreal Engine 5, but most of the narrative and mechanical tweaks feel superfluous, or even actively detract from the horror. It’s technically a little iffy too. Movement is very stiff and you can get stuck on geometry a little too easily. I even experienced a couple of scenarios where I had to restart the game to continue, as well as the occasional lighting bug where suddenly the lighting would go all flat before switching to all UE5 and ray-tracing and atmospheric again.
Most bizarrely of all, the mirror reflections of the husband and wife look like flat-textured avatars you’d expect to see in a game made in 2005. They look nothing like the characters depicted in the portraits… and wasn’t the whole crux of the story that the wife was badly burned in an accident? Well, there’s not a single burn on her flat-textured face in the mirror. I genuinely wonder if they somehow forgot todothis part, or if they somehow didn’t account for the reflections, because they look really out of place in the game.
This bundle has the feel of something put together by a studio with more important things on its mind. As I understand, Bloober outsourced this to Anshar Studios while they continue the little matter of remaking Silent Hill 2, and it has a bit of a ‘do as you will’ feel to it—cobbled together, slathering new layers onto a series of horror games that were fine (if never incredible) as they were. Some of those layers, like the UE5 overhaul, add to the experience, while others—like the whole flashlight-combat stuff—detract from it, so we’re left with something that feels inoffensive, but also a bit unnecessary.
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