Genre: First Person Adventure, Horror, Puzzle

Platform: PC

Available on: PS4, PC, Xbox One

Released: February 16, 2016

Out of the extraordinary flames of P.T.’s unfortunate demise rises the mimcry of a thousand new voices, emulating the surprising terror of that mad hallway – and from the ashes comes a new vision, spreading its wings, to engulf you in its twisted, surreal horror. Layers of Fear picks up the mantle and proceeds to mindfuck you proper. But the question remains – are you left trembling and satisfied?

Let’s get into it.

Graphics/Presentation: 9/10

Layers Of Fear has an impressive level of polish and played smoothly in all my playthroughs on the highest settings. It’s surprisingly beautiful and haunting, and quite colourful for a horror game. It takes place entirely in the old mansion of the painter you play as, frequently melting into the surreal mazes of his fractured mind.

The sound design is riddled with creepy ambient noises, and original music, making the rooms and halls seem alive with that sense of a presence just out of your vision, waiting, watching, following your every move, successfully amplifying the atmosphere of manic terror. The use of sound to draw your attention was smartly used and effective, and, interestingly, noticeably absent or off in the Inheritance DLC.

I hesitate to say the voice acting is good. It’s not terrible, it just reminds me of those audio books in the 80’s with the very enthusiastic “voice actors” reading the story and doing voices for the different characters. It was really well done in that regard, so if that’s the feel they were going for, I guess they nailed it. Either way, it’s effective enough to pull you into the story and feel a realness for the characters, but don’t be expecting any Last Of Us caliber award winning performances. Expect a story that a couple enthusiastic people are reading to you.

Layers Of Fear is an experience, a haunted house on bad acid, with jump scares that are a little too effective, lurking in every dark corner – and a seriously twisted, tragic tale that unfolds as you explore the dark, empty mansion.

You’ll be running down a hall and suddenly hear something behind you, turn to look and the hall is gone and there’s a door in front of you. Turn back and the hall is also gone in this direction now, replaced with an empty wall. Turn back to the door and it’s gone, replaced with the same blank wall, and now you’re suddenly in a very small claustrophobic box with no exits.

Essentially, any time you turn the camera, you can potentially get your mind fucked into a surreal trip that leaves you in a different place. Nothing is as it seems.

Another important thing to note in the presentation is the paintings in the game, which are a mix of original pieces of art and actual real, classic works, with the likes of Goya, Bosch, Rembrandt and many others. Victorian style portraits, Renaissance depictions of hell, some fused together paintings, a general collection of some fucked up, creepy, disturbing imagery that adds real age, and a surreal, ghostly quality to the mansion – and this is all without even mentioning how often they melt or morph and change in front of you, or after you look away.

The main painting in the game, that you, the painter are working on, changes multiple times into some pretty amazing original works of art by the developers, Bloober Team.

Art can set off a room, and in Layers Of Fear it’s just downright unsettling.

Gameplay: 7/10

Layers Of Fear is a first person adventure game with light puzzle elements, and a minimal controller layout similar to the infamous P.T. and other games like Soma. The puzzles are never overly challenging, and mostly serve as light obstacles to overcome, to drive the story forward, though sometimes they’re used in interesting ways to convey a psycho break of madness and manic delusion.

The main focus of the game is on telling the tragic story of the painter through the exploration of the mansion, and ultimately, the insane psychedelic experience of the madhouse – and depending on certain small details throughout the six chapters, the game could end in one of three different ways. It’s a cool feature to encourage replays, but it’s also an easy feature to miss.

Story: 8/10

You play as a painter who has gone mad, obsessively trying to finish his one great piece – his magnum opus. By exploring the mansion you uncover details about his tragic past and how he came to be the broken mess of crazy cakes he has become.

The family tragedy and subsequent spiral into madness isn’t exactly a new, or unique theme, but the story is so grim and macabre that it transcends beyond the generic formula it’s born from and becomes a very disturbing tale of the harsh value of beauty and the dangers of vanity and obsession. There’s also nods to the work and style of HP Lovecraft, in how the madness is portrayed, especially the focus on the rats, and obsession in particular.

Overall, it’s a very well crafted, creepy fucking story and does a great job of capturing the manic terror of of not knowing what is real and what is a delusion of your mind. And when the grim details of the past unfold to reveal what happened in this house of horrors, you’ll want to unlearn all that you have come to know.

Inheritance DLC: 7/10

Inheritance serves as a sort of epilogue to the main game. I don’t want to give much of the story away, so I’m only going to briefly talk about this expansion. It’s an interesting addition and well worth playing through, but it has a much different feel from the main game.

A large part of Inheritance has you playing as a child through flashbacks, so everything is skewed and distorted beyond realistic proportions. There is a weird ethereal light and a somewhat fisheye type lens effect that makes everything seem even more surreal and dream-like than the main game.

One major thing that’s missing in Inheritance is the jump scares. In fact, the entire sense of fear is just not present in the DLC. I even found that I was missing some moments that had been meant to be a jump scare, possibly because the timing of the visual or audio cue was off – which was disappointing, considering how well the main game pulled those moments off.

It’s an interesting expansion and a nice way to close off the story and flesh out some details, and, like the main game, also has three different endings, two of which depend on certain details throughout your playthrough. The final, and according to the painter, true ending is a neat little bit of puzzle piece collection and a secret map that leads the way to the truth. On my first playthrough, I hadn’t finished collecting the puzzle pieces when I stumbled onto one of the other endings by surprise and had to play through again to finish the puzzle and get the “true” ending.

In Conclusion:

Layers of Fear is a great horror game – one of the most fun I’ve played in a while. Bloober Team has created a wickedly good ghostly Victorian atmosphere for some disturbing Lovecraftian madness to play out in, and it’s a thrill ride worth taking. As a package, the game and DLC are a great bundle of entertainment and well worth the reasonable price tag. Easy to recommend to anyone who wants to take a psychedelic journey into madness, and who doesn’t? Right?

Pros: Beautiful graphics, great story, well timed jump scares, paintings, psychedelic mind fuckery, creepy

Cons: Voice acting, easy puzzles, somewhat generic, formulaic

8/10