Layers of Fear

Year: 2016

Developer: Bloober Team

Website: layersoffear.com

Genre: Visionary, atmospheric and gothic horror

Layers of Fear is a horror game of the independent Bloober Team from Poland. It was inspired by Playable Teaser by Hideo Kojima and Guillermo Del Toro, promoting a new Silent Hill chapter, then deleted by Konami.

Luckily, Layers of Fear is not a survival horror game. Yes, luckily, because it is a genre that has made its days; nowadays horror games have to look for new expressive dimensions and partly LOF succeeds in.

It’s a psychological horror with gothic environments and walking simulator (wrong term indeed!) gameplay. In fact there are no monsters to fight or to run from; puzzles to be solved, as well as objects and clues to be collected, they could be counted on one hand fingers. Gameplay is mostly based on exploration of a Victorian mansion. That’s all? Well yes, if it were not for the haunted mansion that seems to have a life of its own!

Walls, furnitures, rooms, etc., everything is trasforming and changing in real time while you’re playing: at one point you turn around: just a moment before there was a wall, now there is a door; you walk around a rectangular hall, but at every turn you always find different furnitures; you have just entered a room that has no other exit, then go back to find that the rest of the house has completely changed; at one point you look up, and where before there was the ceiling, now you can see only an infinite number of floors endlessly rising up to the sky like a skycraper! A triumph of amazing AI, which completely fulfills the player’s actions. It’s what I call interactive environmental metamorphosis! I played very slowly, sipping every moment of tension and mystery; but even when sometimes I went in a hurry, the environment transformations remained perfectly synchronized, giving me a deep sense of loss at the mercy of some kind of malignant and metaphysical entity.

It can be read as a journey into the diseased psyche of the main character, a painter who has lost his mind, has become alcoholic and has sacrificed his family and his loved ones to chase in vain his artistic dream and a fleeting inspiration. The madness is well represented by the last white canvas that threateningly stands in his studio; player’s aim is to achieve his latest masterpiece, the one that will give him fame and success. But it’s a cursed painting, whose colors are made of grisly ingredients. Your mission is to recover these gruesome ingredients through the spectral rooms of the mansion, facing the ghosts of crazyness. You will report to your memory the most tragic and unpleasant events discovering various clues scattered in the ever changing rooms.
A premise worthy of the best Gothic novels by Edgar Allan Poe or Oscar Wilde, it is impossible to not appreciate.

We have to kneel in front of the amazing aesthetics, which finally, after decades of ignorant splatter, divinely recover gothic horror atmospheres.

The immersion in the gothic atmosphere of the Victorian mansion is the fundamental pivot of the title; no horror game is able to give such an aesthetic experience.
Art seeps from every pore! House walls are covered with eerie paintings, whose colors liquefy flooding rooms and corridors, or whose images are distorted and ever changing. The feeling is that you are also in a painting in constant transformation! The Victorian rooms and their furnishings replicate the environments of the paintings hanging on the walls; you often explore rooms where objects are arranged to replicate still lifes or artistic subjects! It’s as your crazy mind is painting in real time the nightmare you are living! Maybe that’s why rooms change constantly, modeled by the brush of a metaphysical and evil painter! Maybe that’s why walls and ceilings melt like colors on a canvas, forcing you to go across real swamps of paint!

This reminds me of other artistic crossovers, such as The Vanishing of Ethan Carter or Alan Wake, who admirably managed the metaphysical confusion between literature and reality; in LOF, we have paintings instead of novels!
There is a beautiful scene that makes the idea: you are going through a long corridor and at one point you hear a great croaking of birds, you see them in the distance pointing toward you, but in the end they are only designed birds that move along the walls of the corridor and then freeze themselves in the static image of a fresco! Fantastic!
Incidentally, among the paintings hanging on the walls, there are few really existing and famous artworks, such as Abbey in the Oakwood (1810) by Caspar Friedrich, Portrait of a Man with Red Turban (1433) by Jan Van Eyck, and Portrait of Anonietta Gonsalvus (1583) by Lavinia Fontana.

A great sound section contributes to strengthen the chilling atmosphere: ambient noises,  faint moans and whispers, creaking of doors, etc. everything is perfect. We have also to mention the haunting original soundtrack.

Thanks to its enormous graphic detail, LOF manages great artistic suggestions.
It is characterized by a great visionary and imaginative power. Horror is not reduced to classic jump scares. I do not deny that LOF makes abundant use of jump-off-the-chair effects, but i would not call it an abuse. In fact, your exploration will be continuously punctuated by creative horrific visions far from trivial. I appreciated so much the efforts of the authors to invent so many not-trivial scare moments, original, visionary, imaginative, with a great artistic peculiarity; most of the time you will not be able to guess what awaits you behind a door or around the corner. Obviously sometimes you’ll face something not so original and just seen elsewhere.

The limit of the title is not the lack of originality, but the repetitiveness. In fact you will be busy for 6 long chapters, in which the above dynamics will always remain the same, only to lose their appeal towards the end. A game with such an art concept deserved a greater variety; e.g. by reducing the chapters and introducing interludes based on different gameplay. But we have to remember that it is an indie production and the gained result is wonderful and miraculous just as it is! I would challenge a major game company to match a similar aesthetic and visionary achievement!

Another limit is the storytelling. The madness of the painter works perfectly, and it is able to provide a good narrative basement, but the plot lays on the background, it is reconstructed mostly putting the collected clues together; luckily, the suggestions of the plot are also reflected by the visions and the aesthetics of the environment. It creates a quite convincing holistic experience, but it could be done more and better. The lack of interactive storytelling mirrors in the three not so much compelling different endings. The first one is very easy to achieve, the others are hard to get, it depends on explorating hidden rooms, searching for some secondary objects and solving some optional puzzles. By the way, when plot and supporting characters become secondary issues, most likely due to budget limits, it is very difficult to provide fitting conclusions.
Nevertheless, the idea of being trapped in an endless loop of madness and horror is fascinating, it is as you are a damned ghost forced to live his sins again and again, a good idea that is well suited to the artistic style of the title.

Rating: 85/100   (Info about Rating)