Layers of Fear

The game is called Layers of Fear.

Thing is i didn't feel anything at all.

I didn't feel the fear that i was supposed to feel

and honestly, the aesthetic here is far away from being intriguing or interesting in the least.

This is why I don't paint.

Amnesia's narrow corridors and defenseless stealth gameplay was unprecedented and terrifying in 2010, but by the time Layers of Fear came out in 2016, the genre of defenseless horror had totally run its course and left me feeling mostly bored playing this game.

Don't get me wrong, Bloober Team works actual magic with the Unity engine, and the graphics and presentation are top-notch. But regardless of how cool some of the visuals are, this game is just an unscary chore to play. Because there are not actual gameplay mechanics besides using the move forward and strafe buttons to move and mouse button to pick up and read notes. the level of immersion is actually pretty low. As a result, even with headphones and a pitch-black room I did not feel even an iota of dread or fear playing this, just the occasional jump scare, which even stopped working after a while.

The game also takes itself WAY too seriously. Whereas a game like Outlast is at least tongue-in-cheek enough to allow for trashy, grindhouse thrills, this game goes the wannabe Silent Hill 2 route where our protagonist is trapped in an eternal hell of his own creation, tormented by his demons and the violent crimes he committed against his family, or whatever. Despite being very portentous, the story did not involve me at all and just felt like a recycling of many tired video game horror tropes.

I don't doubt that Bloober Team has a good game in them, and I think the further they move away from walking simulator's the better they'll improve, but Layers of Fear is to me just a haunted house simulator at best and a dull walking simulator at worst.

I'm probably not quite as down on Layers of Fear as most people scared for the new Silent Hill are, but I have trouble finding any sort of meaty, tangible quality to the experience. Some great use of shifting level design and non-Euclidean space to make the psychological horror aspects feel bewildering give the game a slight identity, but on all other fronts, it is the exact kind of low-budget low-frills low-thrills experience that gives first-person indie horror a bad name. The atmosphere is almost non-existent, with little consistency to each level's feel, and the scares are all absurdly awful. A game with no actual gameplay and just jumpscares can at least make those jumpscares technically sound and not entirely telegraphed.

An engaging story might have saved it, but here too is Layers very paint-by-numbers (LOL). The narrative prods at ideas of depicting alcoholism and grief after suicide as monsters, but clearly the story's implications were far sadder than the devs were really willing to grapple with, so it's all very thin, very spoon-fed even with the abstract chronology of events, and doesn't at all engage with its own material emotionally, instead mining it for whatever cheap scares it can. I may not like Gone Home because it overplays its own hand, but at least it had a hand to play!

very short horror walking sim. its entertaining just examining the well designed environment / mansion. lots of creepy things to look at, and very nice and harrowing paintings to discover. the story can be slightly poignant as you play a struggling artist. the ending is impactful, although the game overall rarely has any intense scares it's mostly the well done tension and atmosphere.

7/10

Layers of Fear was kind of a phenomenon on the internet when it came. People praised it for a while but after some time it seemed like, out of nowhere, everybody just forgot about it. That's due to different reasons.

The story is pretty cliché but, just like in better cases, they could have done something to make it feel a lot more special that how it turned out, it just required a little more imagination and that comes with taking your time during the writing progress but the people who made it definetly didn't had that in mind.

The gameplay is boring, It's almost a walking simulator, the only thing that breaks the monotony are some puzzles and some of them are kinda good (like the one with phonel) but most are quite half-assed. Also, there's an overexcess of jumpscares and scripted death sequences which end up becoming annoying as you progress in the game because they just don't stop popping up. They also make you realize that the game is incredibley linear and you're just here for the ride, so keep walking.

Must say that there are a couple of unintentionally funny moments too and they kinda take you off-guard, some are downright hilarious like a baby doll hitting face first into a wall at full speed and bouncing off while crying in slow-mo (I mean it's funnier to watch really, I can't make it justice through text).

The game is also guilty of something that many indie horror titles seem to have in common after the year 2014: it rips off P.T. too much. Like the animation when the ghost woman catches you is the EXACT same animation that the designers of P.T. used for Lisa Garland and some of the puzzles are very very similar (mostly sections based on loops, which LOF has the undecency of repeating more than twice).

It's not all bad. The aesthetic is lovely, I'm a sucker for gothic architecture and the mansion is rather well designed, it even looks like a real mansion (actually it might be real and they took it as the main base). Some moments are actually unsettling, surreal and well thoughtout, the plot dealing with themes of madness and denial, which help create an oppressive atmosphere and evoke a feeling of dread in the player, you know, like a horror game should do.

In the end, the bad things in Layers of Fear definetly overshadow the good ones, but I can see some people liking it for the aspects listed above. Still, I feel like this game gained a lot of it's popularity due to: a) the cancellation of P.T. and every fucking game critic saying that this was the "best alternative to P.T.", and b) it was a jumpscare galore for youtubers to make S C A R Y playthroughs out of it and get quick views. I don't know if I should recommend it or not, I'm inclined to say no but in the end it's up to you, so play it if you feel like it, maybe you'll get more out of it than I did.