Layers of Fear

Layers of Fear is an odd first for me. In a lot of ways, it feels like my first true psychological horror game. This is a double-edged sword however because it means that, while I'm giving the game credit where it is due, the reliance on the purely psychological hinders it as well. The game throws its weight around for sure, the imagery is intensely unsettling, and there's a palpable sense of dread through every door, into every cramped, decrepit room. But you quickly learn that you can't really die, and that seemed to sap some of the anxiety out of it, at least for me.

The plot could use some work, but it's enough for a horror game. It took me a while to figure out who my character even was, and the game attempts to offer this directly through voice over segments, but these fall a little flat. It's possible that the voice acting just doesn't sell it. The bits of story you can glean from scraps of paper that you find in drawers and on tables are infinitely more interesting, and they act as collectibles too, encouraging at least a second playthrough, though I did not opt to take one.

Without ruining the plot that does exist, I can tell you that you are an artist, and you've had it pretty rough lately, and you're probably going insane. That's all made perfectly clear right from the start, so no spoilers there. The feeling of psychosis is well-executed, the house itself has a distinct Lovecraftian flavor to it, and the scares rarely let up from start to finish. You eventually begin leaning into it though near the end, leaving the ending a bit anti-climactic.

It's difficult to fault the game for that though, as the end of a rollercoaster is hardly the most exciting part of it, and it is certainly what this game feels like. Sure there's the occasional fetch puzzle to slow things down, but they're not so frequent that the game loses any tension. Indeed, some of the more foreboding sections of the game are actually the puzzles. This is hard to pull off, so the game gets a gold star in that respect.

When the game does feel a bit grindy, it's due to the fact that there are way too many drawers and cupboards to open. I can understand wanting the players to work to find clues and collectibles, but entire rooms full of stuff you can open, with nothing for your trouble, tends to draw out the expletives. Eventually, I just wanted to get on with the game and pretty much just stopped looking for story scraps altogether.

While Layers of Fear does occasionally lean on worn-out horror tropes, it pulls these together in a way that makes it unique to the game. After all, it's in the title, you'd have to expect multiple angles of unease, including those that are tried-and-true at this point. So you'll sometimes get what you might see in any number of campy horror flicks, but with its own spin that the game makes as its own.

I "fear" that a lot of these screenshots are too dark to make out, and that is sometimes also a problem in the game itself. There are rooms where things are just too dark, and its hard to find where you need to go next, nevermind where the object in the room you need is. You can't turn the gamma up because that ruins the atmosphere, but between dark corridors and box-height debris you can't walk over, there is the annoying-but-rare situation where you spend way more time in a room than the game probably intended. This breaks momentum and immersion so it's a flaw, though thankfully seldom. 

For a game that was given away for free on Steam here not too long ago, you certainly get more than you bargained for with Layers of Fear. If the idea was to get me hooked and to buy the DLC, well then Mission Accomplished, but this experience is well worth it at full price too. If you like horror games, don't pass this one up.