Layers of Fear is my type of horror game — slow, methodical, and full of dread and uneasiness. Jump scares and survival horror certainly have their place and I enjoy those too, but there’s something to be said for those games that stick with you long after playing them and make you uneasy while you experience them. Games like Sanitarium and Condemned: Criminal Origins are two of my favorites, for example. Anyway, Layers of Fear gets more ‘right’ in this respect than it doesn’t, although it does leave some room for improvement.
So Layers is Unity-engine based first person horror game with an emphasis on exploration. You literally can’t die, there is no health meter and there’s barely a HUD other than the small, optional white dot acting as a “crosshair” and icons to indicate interaction and the object in your possession at the time. Now, I’ll admit, once I realized, probably about an hour in, that dying was not really a concern in Layers, it lost a bit of its edge. That said, I value a frightening atmosphere over a challenging one with death screens and repeated content (a true atmosphere-killer). So between the two designs, I’m glad Bloober Team went the route they did. Indeed, Layers is really entirely about experiencing the horrors of a man’s mind that’s been torn asunder — utterly shattered by the pressure of his work and the demise of his family and all the bad things that go with that. In terms of gameplay, it’s quite scant, as you’re really just getting from point A to B, although it’s the sinister and astonishing journey that makes it all worthwhile.
The experience begins in the early 1900s in a sprawling mansion of the protagonist, an unnamed, yet skilled painter. It’s a typical dark and stormy night, and you’re home alone it seems, with your first goal being to find the key to your workshop, where your life’s work awaits you. The problem is, you simply cannot come to terms with how to finish your masterpiece and it’s eaten away the fabric of your mind. After a somewhat tense ‘introduction,’ things really get weird — and exciting therefore — once you reach your workshop. It’s from here that each of the game’s levels, if you want to call them that, begin. Stepping out of the workshop leads you into an ever-changing nightmarish version of the mansion, with strange imagery, sounds, and best of all, constant surprises in the form of changes to the environment. Better put, it’s where you’re not looking that all of the ‘action’ is taking place. You enter a room, look straight, left, right, it appears to be a dead end, but by the time you turn back around, the path from which you came is gone, replaced instead by an entirely different path. Paintings on the wall change, objects move around, it’s creepy. Whatsmore, much of what you see is realistic — it’s not all entirely dream-like and psychedelic, although there is plenty of that type stressful content as well.
For me, that awesome environment-changing method of inducing stress and fear into the player was exciting and a definite plus for what the game set out to achieve. I’m eager to play this game in VR, and I expect a re-release later this year in that format. But I hope any such release also takes into account a couple of design choices that I thought worked against the immersion and tension of Layers. For one, the doors that automatically close and lock behind you the moment you step into a room felt overhanded to me. It makes the game much more linear than it needed to be. Just as Bloober decided to leave out QTEs and any chance of dying to keep the player immersed and moving forward, I can understand that they want to keep the player from getting lost and frustrated by severing any backtracking. Yet, I think there are better ways to implement such design than closing the door and locking it so suddenly and with such finality. Sure in a way it’s a bit spooky the first time or two, but it’s clear that it was implemented for other reasons. Note that there are multiple paths you can take, some which require investigation to find, so perhaps this door-locking mechanic was to prevent players from having too many chances to find and explore these paths without restarting the chapter; I’m not really sure, but I do feel like it could have been handled a bit better. In a similar vein, the literal writing on the wall trope is used and, while I get that that would be scary in real-life, for a game even as otherwise immersive as Layers, it felt unnecessary because the rest of the experience was saying everything the words were, and more, in a more effective manner.
A second gripe I would bring that’s not a huge deal but still noteworthy is the opening of doors and drawers, of which you’ll do a lot of. Elements of the story are more completely explained by finding notes and things that are tucked in some of the furniture. To do this, you point at the door or drawer in question, see the cue, and then press R2 while moving the left stick in the direction that the door/drawer would actually open. A lot of times you’ll come up to a piece of furniture with stacked drawers, and going between these prompts to switch drawers felt more cumbersome than it should have been. Same with opening cabinet doors, there just some added awkwardness that is regrettable — not game-breaking to be sure, but still somewhat immersion-breaking and I think it’s something Blubber could probably polish up somehow or another if they chose to.
Overall, though, Bloober has done a fine job with Layers of Fear and it’s an experience I’m happy to recommend now and one I hope to relive again in VR later this year.
