Layers of Fear

I didn't finish this game and stopped playing it before the end of chapter 1 of the artist's story.

just wanting to say this game is alright and it's a fine compilation of layers of Fear 1-2 and the DLC but it's just so boring for me, maybe it's because I played it before. I played Layers of Fear 1+2 last year, and I thought I was ready to play this but it doesn't seem so if you played Layers of Fear before this and it was not too long ago, I wouldn't recommend it, the games are experiences- and playing them again just after this short time, isn't good.

Now let's talk about the good things first, the Graphic with raytracing is beautiful, I love it, I made a lot of screenshots because it was so astonishing how good this game looks, and the atmosphere and the music are still extremely good.

now let's talk about the bad, the game is buggy, you sometimes don't hear the sound of jumpscares, things are flying, don't have collisions, etc etc. They have to fix that, it's not as bad as Triple-A games, but there are still a lot of bugs.

I liked the new Feature of the notes getting voice-overs, but sometimes it won't get read out aloud at all, like in Layer of Fear 2, and sometimes it just Skips some of the text, that's just not well made.

The game butchered the feeling of layers of fear 1, very often you will get chased by some women (I think it's his wife) and yeah this whole mechanic is new in this game, and I thought it was refreshing to be chased, but it's not, the game tells a story with atmosphere and psychology horror, the chasing just destroys the pacing of the story, you constantly like ''oh do I get chased now again'' and can't focus on this brilliant story.
This was fine for Layers of Fear 2, as it wasn't overused there, but here it's just so much.

The DLC ''The Last Note'' was ok, but it was a bit too much, the game plays for 6hours in the mansion and after that, you have a DLC in the mansion about the daughter which goes like half an hour, and after that, I was already exhausted but then to have another DLC in that very same mansion, was just boring and the fact you also get chased the whole time doesn't make this better.

Now I won't give this game a bad review because it does things well, and if you never played Layers of Fear, you will probably have fun with this, but for veteran players, I wouldn't recommend this.

I think Layers of Fear 1 was better as the standalone game, and I didn't see any changes in Layers of Fear 2, so you basically just paying for the Last Note DLC and the Lighthouse, and I can't say much about the Lighthouse cool and that last note is boring. It's not worth it.

But still Great Graphics, Great Atmosphere, and Great Soundtrack

Probably worst and definitely most bizarre horror remake in a year full of them for some reason. This features a mostly from the ground up remake of the first game and its DLC, a remaster-ish of the sequel, and a "new story" that's really just a framing device interspersed between chapters of each game to tie it all together as an anthology. The first game is still bloody awful, containing no thrills, relying on every cliche in Gothic horror to fill out its playtime and toning down its subject matter a tiny bit but still mostly feeling confrontational without the drama to earn it. The few moments of splendour and style are arguably ruined in this version; the non-Euclidean mind-bending level design is undercut by Portal 1 style jump cuts whenever the level design has to move without you looking. Add to that a litany of bugs and hard transitions, and you have an even less immersive experience this go around.

LOF2 fares quite a bit better, but still feels below average even for a walking simulator horror game. The story starts too suddenly but is also incredibly drawn out; I figured everything out by the halfway mark of the game and there is very little to see beyond that point. While the base story is okay, using the franchise's mind-bending level design to tie itself to a story about an actor's identity crisis, brought on by extreme childhood trauma, it thinks it's much smarter than it is, with a lot of turns of phrase meant to obfuscate the player's understanding when its thematic resonance is pretty shallow, and knowing the developers, it could just as easily be a poor excuse to mine loaded imagery of schizophrenia or other mental illnesses as it could be a genuine take on the dangers of method acting under extreme duress (with a touch of gender identity issues). But most importantly, the game is never scary, thrilling, interesting to play, and because the game is set on a boat, it might even be less visually pleasing and diverse than the original. Judicious application of Tony Todd is about the only thing that kept me going, even if I only think it's below average and not terrible.

Tying this package together is a new story about a beleaguered writer who locks themselves in a lighthouse to overcome their writer's block, eventually being forced into writing for an evil entity in order to make their power real. Sound familiar? I was not expecting Layers Of Fear to become Alan Wake, but it is not particularly deft of hand at this, with some genuine self-criticism of the first game's cliches and contrivances, but mostly grovels about how mean the critics are and how their criticisms of Bloober just relying on shock tactics are actually the real surface level tactics, man! It's gratuitous, self-serving, and only serves to interrupt the pacing of these stories already mired in pacing problems.

The production of this remake-pilation is also pretty damn poor. There is no consistency in presentation between these two games, and the second game's introduction is so abrupt as a result of it being jury-rigged into one long campaign. The UI, subtitles, voiceover usage and implementation of immersive features could not be any more different between the two games, and it's starkly obvious how the first game was meant to have the big overhaul, but it being outsourced to a different studio means team communication was spotty. Physical texts, transcriptions and voiceovers can all be saying different things with regards to the same item. Typos and syntax errors aplenty, and words and blemishes like coffee stains will often hover off the pages. Characters will talk over themselves, and I even got softlocked at least twice due to the Antechamber level design not working properly. The second game mostly works, you just gotta get used to actually reading the text because it has no narration of its own.

So while I enjoyed moments of the second game's plot, and the first game and extra story are fun to make fun of, the overall package, cheap price aside, is poorly put together in both concept and execution, and none of the core experiences within are even that great. In fact, the whole author angle made me realise that not only does Layers Of Fear fail at ever being a game, it never tries to be because it only thinks of itself as a story. It only understands the most basic conventions of storytelling and has little to no charge of its own, either as interactive media or as a fresh IP with an original artistic outlook. It was tired and dull when it launched and it's aged like milk to the point that every Dark Pictures, despite also being the definition of mediocrity, is still better than this series combined.