Layers of Fear

I played this game about a year ago, and finished it in under 2 hours. This forgotten review was written about a year ago, and I found it by chance. It was buried deep under all my evernote notes.

A few disclaimers before we start. This review isn’t spoiler free (while I try to keep it as such, I can’t promise you that), and it’s ultra casual. A very improper review, if you may. I’m also not a huge fan of horror games and I don’t have a lot of experiences in them, so I might miss out on some stuff that you horror game nerds can point out.

Layers of Fear was released in 2016 by Bloober Team. The same team that released Basement Crawl 2 years earlier, which after its released garnered a lot of negative reviews (for good reason). Layers of Fear, on the other hand, seemed like part of a redemption arc for the studio. Mostly attaining good reviews and praised as being one of the best indie horror games of the year.

The game itself is pretty short, you can finish it in less than 3 hours. For a game that’s essentially a walking simulator sprinkled with a bit of insanity (and a dash of supernatural occurrences) here and there, it seems to be the right amount. If it lasts longer, the game would probably suffer and feel too repetitive.

Speaking of insanity and supernatural things, this game seems like it’s trying to juggle both. The developers had stated that it’s quite impossible to represent the painter’s state of mind without adding supernatural elements to it. Drawing inspiration from one of Oscar Wilde’s most prominent titles, The Picture of Dorian Gray and centuries upon centuries of development of fine art, this is the spawn of the two.

(I did read The Picture of Dorian Gray, but I haven’t finished it, shhh, don’t @ me on this man)

You delve into the mind of a painter who has essentially gone insane whilst trying to create his Magnum Opus, his masterpiece so to speak. You follow him along as he create his masterpiece. Think of it like one of those shows with Bob Ross, but with a splatter of blood and paintings that seemed to have a life of their own.

Let’s get one thing out of the way : I love how the game builds up suspense and anticipation. One of the things they consistently do throughout the whole game is limiting the use of music. Most of the time, all you hear are your footsteps. The soles of your shoes on the floorboards of your own mansion, the pitter-patter of the rain accompanied with violent thunders. A woman sobbing in the next room? A child crying in the hallway? Your own voice in one of the many facets of your lost memories? Perhaps.

Music can enhance the atmosphere of a game, that’s an unwritten rule. But maybe, it’s not the music itself that enhances it but rather the existence of it. The music on its own doesn’t particularly stand out. It works in tandem with the visual representation of the painter’s mind; twisted, dark, and perhaps you can feel some lethargy seeping through. It blends seamlessly into the background. Nothing too much, but the eerie strings provides enough contrast without overshadowing the other aspects in the game. If I have to name a favorite, it’s These Thoughts are Killing Me.

Space, spatial distortions, one of the core elements of the game. People generally dislike games with repetitive layouts. The game is essentially you going through doors and doors and more doors, but you keep ending up in the same room you’ve been to over and over; with each one getting progressively fucked up or seeing it in a new perspective. You look away from the door you’ve opened just moments ago, and when you look back it’s no longer there. Instead, you find a door on a place where it shouldn’t be.

The house seems like it’s huge, spacious, and endless corridors leads to endless branching paths. It seems like a maze, but at the same time it never is. There is always one obvious pathway whenever you traverse throughout the house. You would think it tries to play with one of many children’s most prominent fears, being alone and being lost.

While on the subject of exploiting childhood fears, let’s talk about it more. They convey this through props in the game.

At first, nothing seems out of place. But the more time you spend in this madhouse, the more you realize nothing is as it seems and everything serves a purpose. While some of them serves as meaningless decor, some of them are there to trigger events. One of the things they use a lot for it are light switches. Dark is synonymous to anything bad and whenever you turn off the lights something is bound to happen. It’s like the game is trying to feed on one of our most prominent childhood fears, being in the dark. In this game, turning on the lights would also leave you with something new and instead of being a beacon of hope, it leaves you with an unsettling atmosphere instead; more cryptic words scrawled on the walls, greens and yellows stark against the brown sofa, you name it.

Of course, we can’t leave out the one prop that stood out the most: the paintings. If a game has an achievement for its players to stare at the paintings a total of one hour, then they should damn well be worth it. A lot of the people who worked on the art for the game, have MA degree in arts. They make use of what they learned in terms of fine art, and applied it to a contemporary form of media a.k.a. this video game.

At first, most of them seemed like normal portraits. Sure, you have that one creepy painting of a hairy baby hanging near the staircase, but nothing else stood out. Later on in the game, the fucking little creepy shit is actually useful. The paintings progressively turns more and more grotesque as you remember the things that you’ve done, and they also serve as clues as what you should do next and how. I mean, if you see a hairy baby holding a piece of paper with numbers on it, you’d know what to do with it, right?

Slowly, as you traverse through the mansion, maybe you feel a little bit of empathy towards the painter. Perhaps you see a piece of yourself throughout all this mumbo-jumbo of a fucked up state of mind. Being alone is both an experience and frightening, by its own respects.

None of the scary stuff in the game is, well, scary, if you look at it from a different standpoint. They are twisted images of things, a weird acid trip to an artist’s fucked up mind. No monsters, no creepy long-legged men in tuxes, it’s just how he views his world as is.

While still on the topic of what’s scary, something that’s interesting here is you can actually avoid the scary stuff. I mean hell, you see that creepy lady down the corridor? I’m sure all of us see her, but it’s not imperative for the player to walk down said corridor and greet the spooky lady. He can always turn around and avoid her entirely (remember the words on the wall, ignore her). Sure, if you come closer to her she’d disappear. And if you still decide to walk forward to try and find her, you’ll essentially ‘die’.

Here’s something else I want to talk about : dying. Dying in this game isn’t a ‘game over’ or anything like it, it only alters the ending (meaning you ignored the warnings on the wall). Other than that, there’s no real consequence to it. Whether you get spooked out by a lady in white or fall down from about five stories — height platform, continuing the game is as easy as retracing your steps; as if it had never happened in the first place. This makes for a very interesting continuous narrative.

Although the game has three endings, it lacks replay value. This is probably because the game gets kind of (i’m out of words oh gee golly) boring after an hour or so of playing it. I finished the game in about 2 hours, and by the time I’ve reached 1 hour-ish of me playing the game I don’t get spooked as much anymore. It was as if the game has ran out of ways to actively get under my skin and scare the shit out of me.

I mentioned that the game has three endings. A good ending, a bad ending, and a neutral ending (the one that people commonly get). What ending you’ll get depends on what events you trigger and how you choose to approach things; and the dreaded collectibles. While I like the concept of having collectibles in a game as it adds depth to the game’s story (an efficient plot device, if you will), having a different outcome based on mostly how much collectibles you get is kind of annoying. “But Yana, it’s an exploration game,” i hear you my dude, but would you open trillions of drawers in a single playthrough trying to get all the collectibles; when most of the drawers and cupboards they let you open in game contains non-interactable stuff? Albeit having chapter selection as an option, one player must do three playthroughs in order to get all three endings in a way that feels concrete.

Another thing that bothers me (although it’s a minor thing), that it doesn’t tell you when it autosaves. Autosave can either be a gift from god or not (if all my favorite visual novels have autosave and only autosave I’ll cry), and when the game does have autosave it usually shows a tiny icon in the corner of the screen to tell you “Hey, my dude, I’m saving your progress so would you kindly not shit on your computer while I’m at it? Thanks,”. This game doesn’t have that. It’s not a huge con for the game, but heck i’m the kind of person who wants to know how far the game saves my progress so when i reopen the game I don’t get shit on and get plopped down onto part of the game that I’ve already been through and done with. One of the developers in the steam discussions for the game mentions that the game saves automatically whenever you enter a new room (which is pretty damn convenient if they were to say that since the start).

While the puzzles are integrated into how the game plays out its story, it can feel boring and ‘too easy’ at times. Not only that, I find the controls to be a bit wonky.

The game fails to keep people motivated throughout during some parts, and it all comes down to the point where you’d finish the game just because you need to finish it; less than because you actually want to play the game. And as previously mentioned, it lacks replay value. The only thing that’ll possibly motivate people to replay the game is probably just for achievements, and even then they can replay the game from any chapter; so they don’t have to re-do the whole game all over again once they’re finished. I do like the fact that they give you the option to do it.

That about wraps up this (air quotes) review (end air quotes). I do have the DLC for the game and I haven’t played it. In retrospect, I probably should’ve played it and make this a review on that also. But alas, here we are.

Thank you for reading this entire mess, please let me know if I missed anything. If you’d like to shit on this writing of mine, go on ahead. I’m all for constructive criticism. Hit me up on instagram (veedyagaems).