It’s upsettingly easy for an act of creation to become self-destructive. Art — whether it’s music, writing, assembling multicolored lanyards, whatever — carries the danger of vulnerability. It’s all too easy to depend on others for approval, especially if your livelihood depends on it. Games have shown us what that selfish obsession can do to a person’s psyche, if rarely from the perspective of the obsessive. Now, Layers of Fear puts us inside just such a mind.
Layers of Fear is a first-person horror game. While it doesn’t directly allude to doomed Silent Hills advertisement P.T., preview coverage has hardly shied away from the comparison. Developer Bloober Team has itself described the game as “psychedelic horror,” and the final product falls somewhere between the two descriptions.
Our “hero” is a disturbed, formerly well-to-do painter trapped both inside a sprawling 19th century home and his own insecurities. As he explores the house it begins to warp and change. Subtly, rooms and hallways turn back in on themselves, just as in P.T. More often, the house turns as twisted as its occupant, with “psychedelic” happenings all around. Furniture floats, paintings begin to melt, and the unnamed artist’s hallucinations take a stronger and stronger hold.
Layers of Fear doesn’t waste time getting jumpy. After the briefest introduction to the house, the tortured logic of your objective becomes clear. There are six components missing from the artist’s masterpiece — the one that will finally shake that miserable inability to please the masses — and you have to collect them. They’re hidden behind an equal number of vignettes flooded with clues about his manic state, and no shortage of jump scares.
There isn’t really a non-hallucinatory baseline to compare the phantoms to. As well-designed as they are, the psychedelic constructs can sometimes — though not too often — feel a little mundane.
Thankfully, the over-the-top scares are often balanced by a more traditional middle ground. Creepy clichés like hidden children crying, books falling off shelves, and a shrieking specter rearing its disfigured head every once in a while may seem hackneyed, but they actually sent a background chill up my spine by comparison.
Layers of Fear avoids spoiling its tension further by doing away with frustrating puzzles and fail states. That is to say, you probably won’t get stuck.
One of my biggest problems with horror games lately has been that the same scare isn’t quite so spooky the second, third, or even fourth time around. Games like the otherwise stellar Soma, and even P.T., have fallen victim to this in the past through frustrating encounters with enemies and overly obscure puzzles. Layers of Fear sidesteps the problem by simply not including either.
What amounts to a puzzle in Layers of Fear is usually searching a room for the combination to a lock, or sometimes just looking in the right direction. The result is a bit like a faux haunted house, but a good, faux haunted house with lots of heart, creativity, and higher-than-usual production values poured in.
Less impressive is the story. Layers of Fear is an appropriately over-the-top campfire story, and nothing more. Its rich premise of obsession and disease is too often undercut by tropes matching the creepy, vacant dolls littered through its stages.
The artist’s fall from public grace includes a descent into alcoholism, as well as losing custody of a child, seemingly because that’s just what you do when writing a desperate character. It’s more interested in the “sexy,” sordid symptoms of its subject’s illness than the root cause. There is a potentially interesting thread about — in this case literal — objectification, but it never comes all the way together.
As a result, Layers of Fear feels ironically surface level. In the plot department, anyway.
The rest of Layers of Fear is as fun and frightening as a late-night run through someplace you’re not supposed to be. It’s scary, exaggerated, and triggers your adrenaline. By bedtime you’ve forgotten what you were so scared of in the first place. Hopefully.
