On the other, it makes it all the more disturbing when it hits you with something new. Sometimes it even temporarily traps you in a room to make you watch a scare play out. There are only so many times the lights can go out before you learn to wait for things to go bang. As you progress, however, you encounter set-ups that you've seen before, leaving you able to guess what's coming. This intensifies the shock value of the traditional jump scares that throng your journey through the house. Doors vanish, corners become endless and scenery rearranges itself behind your back." "The house appears straightforward at first, but it warps and changes around you. The constant trickery keeps you on edge and reminds you that even though it's your fingers on the mouse and keys, you're not the one in control. But it creates mistrust of your environment.
It's never a maze: the right direction is always easy to find. Doors vanish, corners become endless and scenery rearranges itself behind your back. The house appears straightforward at first, but it warps and changes around you. Disorientating the player by sweeping aside norms of space and time is what this game does best, and what powers its dense atmosphere. These include one of the game's best moments where it subverts your expectations of geometry to set up a fine shock. There are a couple of more testing brainteasers toward the end. Doors accidentally shut before you can go through, and it proves hard to open more than one drawer in a chest. It's a tried and tested way to add touch to a virtual world, but the implementation here is poor and can leave you frustrated as you grab and fumble to no avail. You interact with the house by clicking and dragging to move items and open containers. The latter comes from puzzles, most of which are light and come down to scanning the environment for visual clues. With you cast as the central monster, and a sympathetic one at that, Layers of Fear has to go elsewhere for both challenge and jump scares. This is the story of a man failing to live up to his responsibilities and lashing out. But on the whole it works, lending the narrative and the character a weight of realism. Sometimes this breaks into banality with clumsy nonsense suited to a high-school poet. There are hints of it throughout from deranged messages on the walls to a scrawled drawing of a sad face hidden on a child's toy. The shock came from understanding how ordinary most monsters seem on the outside. But there was just a normal man staring back at me. Shortly after, I found a mirror and gazed on my own reflection, expecting to see a monstrous figure or some other scare. Later, a disembodied voice whispered "you deserve this, all of it," and it felt like I did. After a short time I found myself appalled enough by my own avatar to start mouthing questions at it: what did you do? What did you do? It's down to the player's imagination to colour in the substantial blanks with nightmares of their choice. Many of these show how commonplace your life once was, illustrating how ordinary most monsters must look from the outside. Scraps of text found throughout the house build a fragmentary backstory. Soon it becomes clear that your past contains ghastly secrets, alcoholism and insanity being two of the more palatable ones. "You realise that there is one active monster in the game, and it's the one behind the keyboard." It creates a unique and disturbing environment to explore. The visual style has clear nods to surrealist painters such as Bacon and Goya. Walls bear distorted versions of classical masterpieces. There is paint daubed liberally over the environment, smears of jarring colours running over the furniture and floors. The time period is perhaps purposefully unclear, but seems to be mid-20th century.
LAYERS OF FEAR REVIEW HOW TO
Beyond that you must wander the sizeable halls in first-person view, working out for yourself what to do and how to do it. Your only instruction at the start is to "finish it". You play as a painter, who has returned to their house and studio to complete their masterwork. What every good horror yarn needs is a unique spin, and Layers of Fear delivers that, quite literally, through artistry.
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