Layers of Fear review | VG247
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Layers of Fear (2023) brings together the stories of Layers of Fear (2016) and Layers of Fear 2 (2019), remastering the two horror titles in Unreal Engine 5 to deliver an unnerving and fluid journey into the psyche of creatives who They have gone. angry. Sadly, this remake represents the best and worst of Bloober Team.
This time you will start as The Writer, a new character destined to write the disturbing stories of The Artist and The Actor, while you encounter your own strange occurrences in the Lighthouse in which you are hidden. Having won a competition to write a book about ‘one of the most mysterious and tragic figures in modern art history’, you’ll explore winding corridors and answer a ringing phone eerily reminiscent of the game’s inspiration, PT
Soon, you will be taken to the grand home of the Painter and his family, and things will feel familiar again. A house in complete disarray, burning candles and dimly lit lamps in every room, even the letter from pest control threatening us with lawyers if we contact them again, they are still here. The only big difference is in quality; Built on Unreal Engine 5, Layers of Fear (2023) looks ridiculously good, at best, anyway.
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Much like the original Layers of Fear, and even the aforementioned PT demo, nothing here is as it seems. You will enter the rooms only to re-emerge in a different place. You’ll see a perfectly normal painting transform into something else in the blink of an eye. Shadows in the shape of the artist’s wife creep slowly through the halls. With this, you begin to question yourself. What is real and what is not in this illusory hell? It’s like you’re in purgatory, forced to face a character’s trauma head-on in hopes of finally escaping these never-ending nightmares.
As the game progresses and things become more and more surreal: blood oozes from paintings, house fires fade almost as quickly as they appear, doors spit you out in completely different rooms than the one you came from. , there are also more visual glitches and I’m pretty sure they’re not all intentional. Shining my light on certain corners revealed the silhouette of documents and other items that shouldn’t have been there. When turning tight corners, the walls would often flicker, and sometimes the prompts to interact with items would just disappear. On one occasion, I also clearly ended up in an area I wasn’t supposed to be in; after waking up in a room and starting to approach a distant item, I was teleported through walls and into a corridor where I couldn’t move more than a meter. There was no escape, except to return to the main menu.
Bugs are also not removed during The Actor’s story; at this point, my subtitles were only working how and when they wanted, and my ‘Press to Drag’ setting that I had enabled to save my sore hands from the shackles of my Xbox controller stopped working as well. There were many points where I questioned if something was broken or if the game was playing tricks on me; usually it was the latter, but having this thought after encountering one problem after another began to break the dive.
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Other than this, The Painter’s story is continually interesting, especially in its second half. Things get more exciting, with The Painter’s luxurious home gradually falling into decay as more of his past is revealed; the once beautiful home becomes simply an infrastructure of ashes, decay, and some truly horrific memories. When the dolls and chandeliers aren’t rocking for the whole show, there’s a lot to appreciate about The Artist’s story; the narrative itself, the omniscient presence of the wounded wife and her child… who we never get to know much about, but we can see that things weren’t all sunshine and rainbows for them.
Layers of Fear starts off incredibly strong, but starts to falter in the second half of the game. Ultimately, The Actor’s story let me down; even with The Writer to weave the stories into play, The Actor’s story just doesn’t seem to fit. Even when approached as a stand-alone story, it doesn’t build suspense like The Artists story does, the storytelling isn’t quite as effective, and the writing is much poorer.
Perhaps my patience had run out when I got into The Actor’s story, but piecing together the story of this crazed director aboard an omnipotent ship and his accompanying crew became a drag. It’s obtuse, and often nonsensical, with so many horror tropes thrown in that it’s hard to put my finger on what the Bloober Team was trying to do with this particular story.
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That said, it’s ambitious, and I can appreciate it. The Actor’s story sees several elements added to the game; we can run, crawl, climb and often have to outrun a monster that, in this scenario, reminds me so much of The Thing. His story trickles down through whispers and item interactions, and the puzzles have some depth to them. The tricks employed to disorient players also feel much more subtle than The Artist’s, and the illusions you turn yourself into are just as wild as the first half of the game. Yet even with all these great additions, The Actor’s story won’t captivate you half as much as The Artist, or even The Writer.
As ambitious as The Actor’s story is, it quickly gets boring. Flipping through film reels to discover secret doors, lighting up mannequins so they can retell past events, and generally trying to figure out what happened to our director aboard this ship becomes more frustrating than scary. The ambition shown can be respected, but it’s arguable that Bloober Team went too ambitious here and left us with a hodgepodge of horror references and mannequin-related trickery to navigate to the detriment of The Actor’s true story and ultimately instance, the complete remake.
Layers of Fear (2023) starts off strong with The Artist’s story, and loses itself in the midst of its own ambition during The Actor’s story. Bloober Team’s meaningful exploration of one character’s descent into madness quickly becomes redundant amid a sea of film references and blurry storytelling. Layers of Fear is certainly a cohesive remake that pulls together the original games, and there’s no denying that it looks great, but its second act feels incredibly lost when set against such a strong start. Layers of Fear (2023) is a major case of whiplash, that’s for sure, but it shows Bloober Team’s potential for good if it can pin down the focal points of the stories it tells.
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