LoF strikes that balance just right.Ī scare is only as effective as the music that accompanies it, as proven by countless modern horror games that rely on a sudden high-pitched sound or a thumping, doomsaying bass note. A lot of people play games like Layers of Fear to accelerate their heart rate, not to feel like they’re challenging Magnus Carlsen to a game of chess.
Personally, this was a relief – challenging puzzles within horror games tend to take me out of the experience. Layers of Fear constantly locks you into a single room, so with enough exploration, the solution is ultimately never far away. For the most part, these don’t really tax your brain at all as they can typically be bested by using one of three techniques: 1) spin around, 2) look up, or 3) fumble around the room until you find what you need. You will suffer for your art.Īs this is, a modern horror game, the puzzles come in thick and fast, offering a new challenge in almost every other room. Their artistry is the first telling sign that this isn’t just another horror game and helps to convey the theme perfectly. Whoever created the art featured within the game, whether it’s the vivid hallucinations or the unsettling canvases dotted around the house, is the true hero of Layers of Fear. When you finally piece the mystery together, it’s absolutely heart-rending.įinding items around the house helps your canvas to take shape, becoming curiously grotesque the more you progress. There’s always the suspicion that this story isn’t going to have a happy ending and, thanks to some capable voiceover work and visual clues around the mansion, that suspicion only becomes stronger as time goes on. The plot is difficult to go into without spoiling anything, but the gist is that the painter is trying to create his magnum opus while struggling to deal with the onslaught of ghoulish sights his mind is conjuring up and why he’s alone. Once you’ve spent more than an hour trying to find a semblance of sense in everything that’s going on, it will feel like your prison too. Layers of Fear’s greatest asset is how it is able to drastically twist even the most ordinary of rooms into a nightmarish prison for the painter’s damaged psyche. Waking up in the protagonist’s Victorian mansion, the opulence of the setting soon gives away to distorted visions that would even make David Lynch wake up in a cold sweat. Pitting you as a peg-legged, mentally suffering painter, Bloober Team’s first-person horror doesn’t let you think that everything is rosy for too long. Even though it may stick to some of the tropes of its genre, it destroys conventions in other places, making it one of the most unforgettable experiences of terror I have ever had. A lot of these titles seem to follow a set template, like there’s an RPG Maker for horror where you can insert an asset here, shoehorn in an ineffective jumpscare there.īut not Layers of Fear. So many of them litter Steam like literal garbage mostly half-assed efforts destined for nothing but YouTube fodder for shrieking content creators. Modern horror games are in a strange state.
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