It seems fitting that Bloober Team has recently announced their departure from psychological horror, after releasing Layers of Fear which is easily their best work. Well… maybe releasing isn’t the right word. In case you were confused and thought you entered a time warp back to 2016, this is part remake, remaster and a sequel, with a heavy emphasis on the first two over the latter.

If you’re new to the series, it follows artists plagued with issues, be it a case of writer’s block, dealing with an insane director, demonic possession, or problems at home; sometimes it is a mixture. You will switch shoes somewhat frequently and experience each artist’s plight in the first-person view, a view that skews and changes regularly in a way that makes the player question the very reality of what’s shown. It’s something that Bloober Team has perfected and maintained for better or worse across their releases and is easy to reference as their greatest strength, which is likely why Konami tapped them to remake Silent Hill 2. With this being said, I would recommend this title to any new player without hesitation as this is the best way to experience it, but your mileage may vary if it’s not fresh.

For returning players, it’s a little harder to recommend – not because it’s a bad game (it isn’t), but it’s mostly retreading the same ground. This is essentially Layers of Fear, Layers of Fear 2, and The Inheritance. I completed all these when they were first released, but it also has what I believe to be a newer expansion or one I somehow missed: The Final Note. Then there’s the writer’s story, which is the only part that is entirely new to the package combined into a beefy 13+ hour campaign. If you’re doing the math in your head, that equates to maybe two hours of entirely new content, and that’s being generous. Each story had small bits added here and there to combine them into a somewhat coherent story with a new antagonist, The Rat Queen, making an appearance in every remade segment, but only as a narrative device. You’re still going to be running from the same ghoulish beings in the revisited areas, solving mostly the same puzzles and exploring the same areas outside of the lighthouse that works as the writer’s prison of her own making.

What has changed is the visuals. I remember playing the first game and thinking it looked kind of archaic at the time, even when it was new. Being in Unreal Engine 5 reversed this, putting it on par with the other AAA horror heavyweights like the more recent first-person Resident Evil games. The lighting, shadows, and sheer amount of detail make this a beautiful game to stare at for an excessive amount of time and excites me for what Unreal Engine 5 will deliver in the future. This upgrade made revisiting the first game surreal for me, as it negated one of my biggest issues with easily the best in the series, and I found myself completing the first narrative in one sitting without realizing that hours had passed. Sadly, the rest of the game didn’t hold the momentum.

Layers of Fear is largely a walking simulator and a very linear one at that – it’s akin to an on-rails shooter that doesn’t involve shooting. The developers put you right where they want you when they want you there, and usually with only a singular path forward, keeping you in their little box as you walk along it. There are a fair amount of impressive puzzles to solve, but for every standout brain teaser, there is at least one that tasks the player with doing little beyond finding a key item or something to drive the narrative forward, as the world around you shifts and contorts in ways meant to confuse or scare the player. Outside of the psychological elements, the scares are fairly tame and are even less impacting on a return visit. It was similar to revisiting the same local haunted house during the Halloween season, knowing where everything is and thanks to the way the story is broken up, feels like you get shuffled into a new holding area to wait in line again at regular intervals. Even my 10-year-old son who is easy to spook sat in watching most of the game and asked at multiple intervals if this was supposed to be scary because it “just seemed weird to him.”

The game bookends the other stories with the writer, and will occasionally take a break from the mainline entries to return to the lighthouse for brief periods with only one major “puzzle” that I counted in her entry. This not only lost tension from the story I was enthralled in, but made her part of the game feel even smaller. I get this was an effort to set the tone as she was writing the other stories within the game; however, it loses some impact when you take into account the DLC packages are handled differently, being selected from a table that allows you to complete them whenever you wish, in one run. You will get the occasional voice-over that will give some backstory, see the Rat Queen here and there, and get to experience them with the same upgrades applied to the whole package, but these sections feel tacked on as an afterthought due to not fitting neatly within the overall narrative like the mainline releases. I almost feel like playing the prologue and opening the rest naturally or at your leisure would’ve been a better approach. Maybe it’s just the fact that Layers of Fear 2 is a meaty game by default and kind of drags in some areas, but by the time I finished this one, as well as the original and its associated DLC that all take place within a slightly different version of the same house, I can say the latter two-thirds of this game felt like a slog to me. This would have been an opportune time to fix some of the wrongs with the 2nd entry, such as cutting down on some of the repetitive ship segments, but sadly, I only felt like there was less of Tony Todd’s director, with the writers’ voiceover added in his place. I may be wrong – it’s been a few years since I completed the original, but nonetheless, I think having the irreplaceable Tony Todd narrate the entire experience would’ve elevated this, at least for me.  This culminated with the writer’s story being over when it felt like it should just have begun and left me saying “That’s it?” when the credits rolled.

Outside of this complaint, which might be just my feeling of urgency to get through the entire game for this review since I received the code a significant time after release, the game performs mostly as it should with minimal issues. Of course, the nagging floating object issue that horror games are prone to is a thing here, which I kind of expected but still hate even though it’s standard at this point. There are also some achievement progress/unlocking issues I’ve noticed if that’s a concern for you. Specifically, I didn’t get the associated points for completing The Inheritance and I have been stuck at 30% of finding a small number of notes since the first major portion of the game, despite finding what seemed like hundreds. I also experienced a large string of them unlocking at once in rapid-fire mode upon relaunching the game a few times. I was also mildly annoyed at having to either forfeit hearing the entire scripted backstory that plays out via a voiceover when picking up key story items or sitting there staring at a mostly static image for an extended period of time when most games allow the voiceover to carry on even once you exit the item or note.

With multiple endings, tons of collectibles (that may or may not count on your achievement tracker), and a larger-than-average horror campaign, Layers of Fear is easy to recommend to new players with an affinity for psychological experiences. For returning players such as myself, it may not be the game you were hoping for, but the upgrades make a retread doable, even if you know where the story is going.

8 out of 10

Pros

• A Complete Package of The Layers of Fear series
• Outstanding Visuals
• The Updated Look of the Original Game

Cons

• Achievement Tracking Issues
• Becomes a Slog for Returning Players
• The Narrative Presentation Feels Off

Layers of Fear was developed by Anshar Studios in association with Bloober Team and was published by Bloober Team. It is available on PC, PS5 and XSX. The game was provided to us for review on XSX. If you’d like to see more of Layers of Fear, check out the official site.

 

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