Layers of Fear (2023) brings together the stories of Layers of Fear (2016) and Layers of Fear 2 (2019), remastering both horror games in Unreal Engine 5 to deliver a seamless, mind-bending twist on the creative side. Brigade – Gone – Crazy. Sadly, this remake represents the best and worst of Bloober Team.
This time you’ll start out as a writer, a new character destined to write the disturbing stories of artists and actors, while encountering your own unusual happenings in the lighthouse you’re hiding out of.Competing to write a book about “one of the most enigmatic and tragic figures in the history of modern art,” you’ll explore winding corridors and tend to a phone that’s eerily reminiscent of the bell in the game-inspired PT
Soon enough, you’re taken to the mansion of the painter and his family, and everything starts to feel familiar again. A home in complete disarray with burning candles and dim lights in every room, even letters from pest control threatening us to get a lawyer if we contact them again, is still here. The only noticeable difference is quality; Layers of Fear (2023) is built with Unreal Engine 5, and it looks ridiculously good even at its best.
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Like the original Layers of Fear, or even the aforementioned PT presentation, nothing here is what it seems. You’ll enter a room and reappear in a different place. You’ll see a perfectly normal painting transform into something else in the blink of an eye. A shadow shaped like an artist’s wife crawled slowly down the corridor. With this, you start to question yourself. In this unreal hellscape, what’s real and what’s not? It’s as if you’re in purgatory, forced to confront your characters’ traumas, hoping to finally escape these never-ending nightmares.
Things only get more surreal as the game progresses – blood pours from paintings, house fires disappear almost as quickly as they appear, doors spit you out of rooms completely different from the one you came from – and more Visual glitches also appear, and I’m pretty sure they’re not intentional. Lighting up certain corners with my flashlight reveals the outlines of documents and other items that shouldn’t be there. Walls are often seen to flicker when turning, and sometimes, prompts to interact with items disappear. At one point, I also apparently entered an area I wasn’t supposed to be in; after waking up in a room and starting to approach distant objects, I was teleported through the wall to a corridor in which I couldn’t move more than a rice. There is no escape, only return to the main menu.
In the actor’s story, the bugs weren’t squashed either; at this point, my subtitles only worked when they wanted them to, and the “press-to-drag” setting I had enabled, which was supposed to let me hands free from the Xbox controller. There were many places where I questioned whether something was broken, or if the game was playing a joke on me; usually, it was the latter, but after one problem after another, the thought started to break the immersion anyway.
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Other than that, the painter’s story is always interesting, especially in the second half. Things become even more hallucinatory, with the painter’s lavish home falling into disrepair as further revelations of his past are revealed; the once beautiful home is only reduced to ash, decay and the infrastructure of some truly horrific memories. When dolls and candlesticks aren’t convulsed throughout the show, there’s a lot to appreciate in the artist’s story; the storytelling itself, the omniscient presence of the wounded wife and their child…we never really get to know them, but We can see that things aren’t all sunshine and rainbows for them.
Layers of Fear starts out strong, but starts to falter in the second half of the game. Ultimately, the actor’s story failed me; the actor’s story didn’t fit, even if there were writers to interweave the story together. Even when handled as a standalone story, it doesn’t build suspense like an artist’s story, the storytelling is nowhere near as effective, and the writing is far worse.
Maybe my patience ran out when I dabbled in the actors’ stories, but piecing together the story of the deranged director on an omnipotent ship and the crew who accompanied them became a drag. It’s dull and often nonsensical, cramming in so many horror tropes that it’s hard to pinpoint what Bloober Team is trying to do with this particular story.
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That said, it’s ambitious, and I appreciate that. The Actor’s story adds various elements to the gameplay; we can sprint, crawl, climb, and often have to run past a monster – in this case – that reminds me of The Thing. Its story is fed to you through whispers and item interactions, and the puzzles have some depth. The techniques used to confuse the player are also more subtle than those of The Artist, and the illusion that you find yourself a part of is just as wild as the first half of the game. Yet even with all this great content added in, an actor’s story doesn’t hold you in the same way that an artist or even a writer does.
Despite the cast’s ambitious story, it quickly becomes boring. Flipping through film reels to uncover secret doors, shining lights on mannequins so they can recount past events, and generally trying to figure out what happened to our director on this ship becomes more frustrating than terrifying. The ambitions in the show are respectable, but it’s arguable that Bloober Team is overly ambitious here, leaving us with a slew of horror references and mannequin-related gags to the detriment of the actors’ real stories and, ultimately, the whole remake.
Layers of Fear (2023) opens with the story of an artist, lost in his own ambitions, in the story of an actor. Bloober Team’s once-meaningful exploration of a character’s descent into madness quickly becomes redundant amidst the plethora of movie references and vague storytelling. Layers of Fear is certainly a remake that puts the original game together, and there’s no denying that it looks great, but its second act is incredibly underwhelming compared to such a strong start. Layers of Fear (2023) is a prime case for thrashing, that’s for sure, but it does demonstrate the potential for Bloober Team to do good, if it can nail the focus of the stories it tells.
