#170: Layers of Fear
Bloober Team’s attempt to capitalize on the popularity of PT Demo has no depth
This review was originally posted to Twitter on August 25, 2019.
Initial release: February 16, 2016
Platform: PC, Playstation 4, XBox One
Developer: Bloober Team
Look, here’s a disclaimer: sometimes I get games for free. Somehow I got a copy of Bloober Team’s Layers of Fear, now idea how, it might’ve been a giveaway. It sat neglected in my library for a while until I finally sat down to play through it, and to be quite honest, it’s not worth the $0.00 I paid for it.
For what it’s worth, I fully admit that despite my own rolling my eyes at it, Konami’s infamous PT Demo, that valuable — and memory-holed — demo for Hideo Kojima’s unreleased Silent Hill sequel, was a big influence on horror games, raising the level of detail to near-realism (at least by the standards of the time) while reducing the “gamey” aspect. Bloober Team saw the way that PT Demo seemed to be changing the game and with Layers of Fear attempts to replicate this, but it lacks even what soul “PT demo” had.
Make no mistake: Bloober Team have crafted a surprisingly gorgeous game. I’ve long maintained that the key to good graphics is realistic lighting and good texturing, and Layers has managed both of those very well. the problem is, and this is my issue with PT Demo too, graphics aren’t everything.
It’s the 1920s (maybe) and you’re an artist who’s just come home to an empty house. Your wife and daughter are nowhere to be seen. At first everything seems normal, if a bit lonely, but after getting into your workshop, it’s clear that the fellow you’re playing has gone spare. Cue a three-hour haunted house ride that relies mostly on cheap jumpscares and boring puzzles to tell a vague story that seems to be about a neglectful artist who falls into depression and mental illness following his musician wife’s disfigurement in a fire.
I say “seems to” because there’s a lot of little details that are jumbled about, very little of it mattering. About an hour in I was no longer carefully slipping through doorways but instead barging through any door that opened away from me, just trying to get it over with.
This is as boilerplate a horror game as you can get. There’s Youtubers who have made a career on playing games like this, and Layers of Fear feels like the platonic ideal of a Youtube-bait horror game. It uses every lazy overused “psychological horror” trope in the book in an attempt to scare the player, but after six million identical hallways and an equal amount of lazy jumpscares it stops really having an effect. This is a game that wants very hard to be taken seriously, to be the next Silent Hill(s), to be the next Amnesia, hell, the next Gone Home — to that end it’s littered itself with dozens of things to open and poke around in, and yet 90% of them contain nothing of interest. With its unreliable narrative and confused jumble of plot breadcrumbs, Layers of Fear hints at the notion that this game has layers, like a painting covered by another, to gently peel back to get to a perceived truth that in the end does not exist, not even as a blank canvas.
If you were upset about what happened to Silent Hills and PT Demo (I wasn’t — but then, I’ve been mad at the Silent Hill series pretty much since Silent Hill 4: The Room) then for a while this game was the closest you’re going to get. The game opens by telling you “you probably deserve it,” but maybe you should ask yourself if what you really deserve is a better game.
