Layers of Fear is a creepy experience in a digital haunted house, unfortunately the visual trickery and horror atmosphere can only do so much to overcome repetitious item hunting for bits of story.
Layers of Fear
Developer: Bloober Team
Price: $20
Platform: PS4, PC, XB1
MonsterVine was provided with codes for review.
Layers of Fear starts with a brief monologue from the main character, an unknown artist that has gone through hell for his craft. Returning home to finish his most important work of art, a final portrait. The gameplay begins with the exploration of a house. Players are given little direction and are set loose to explore a beautiful, Victorian-era home. The environment is heavily detailed but lacks depth in how players can interact. Only key objects can be picked up, examined or put into an inventory. These key objects offer bits of story elements and are scattered throughout the house in the form of pictures, newspaper clippings and typewritten letters. They offer some insight into what has happened throughout the life of the artist, but doesn’t paint a full picture and are often tedious to discover. In a world with so many objects, a restriction to only interact with specific items sounds like a great solution, however each room is littered with drawers, dressers, cabinets and other wooden containers that CAN contain interesting narrative content, however most of these containers only carry cosmetic items and are filler detail. This item hunt reintroduces any tedium that the restriction of interactivity relieved.
This is because the direct interaction with these abundant containers is the clunky and tiresome nature of how the player interacts with objects in the world, specifically opening drawers and cabinets. To do this core action of the game, players lineup their cursor on the desired object, press and hold the action button (left click on PC, RT on console) and use the look controls to push, pull or slide a variety of doors, drawers and chests. Normally this wouldn’t be much of an issue, but Bloober Team placed a lot of interesting backstory, the parts I was most interested in discovering. I wanted to find every clipping, letter and unsettling photo I could get my hands on. These optional collectibles are interesting to read and only helped ramp up the creep factor throughout the game. Unfortunately digging through hundreds of empty chest of drawers, night stands, and more in the hopes of finding more pulled me out of the immersion. In several instances I was looking through these containers during times when the game wanted my focus to be elsewhere, further disconnecting me from the world. Several tension building moments or scary bits were ruined by rummaging through a bunch of drawers, which just ended up being empty anyway.
Where these interaction mechanics do work however is through the opening of doors to go through rooms. The analog control of how open a door is builds tension in a tactile, meaningful way. I dreaded swinging a door open fast, not knowing what was going to happen. Even slowly creaking a door open left me vulnerable for scares but I liked having it as an option. The way that Bloober Team stitched these doors together with ever changing rooms was impressive. When the layout of the environment changes, any sort of noticeable pause or technical slowdown from a load would often break the illusion. Layers of Fear has no such load slowdowns and this was one of my favorite parts of the game. The environment is constantly changing, growing, expanding, dripping and creeping in a way that is.
The puzzles are not as subtle. When you get to a puzzle, you won’t be able to miss it. The path ends, all doors are locked until the puzzle is solved. They aren’t much trouble and can all be solved by interacting with all interactable objects in the room, and usually end in finding a series of numbers to enter into a combination lock or a rotary phone. Sometime around the halfway mark, things get a little more involved with multi-room puzzles and a slight failstate possibility, but when this change happens, the rules aren’t clear and leads to some unintended confusion. Layers of Fear needed a greater number of more complicated puzzles, that had more narrative content on the surface, and not tucked away in a drawer somewhere.
What Layers of Fear does really well is creating a tense atmosphere that genuinely creeped me out on multiple occasions. Footsteps change from creaking boards, broken glass, to strange sloshing depending on the scene. Disturbing whispering, babies crying and a woman screaming adds to the tension of their particular environment, and unsettled me. The music was haunting and pleasant at the same time, a mixture that when paired with the visual happenings of a set piece moment becomes bone chilling.
The Final Word
Layers of Fear uses environmental trickery to paint an unsettling creepy depiction of a crazy artist’s mind. Bloober Team puts their own twist on the changing, looping hallway concept from P.T. with it’s horrifying atmosphere and fleshes it out with interactive details, voice acting and a disturbing narrative. However the clunky interactivity and lack of meaningful story content left me disappointed. There is something special about this haunted house simulator, but it gets misplaced in one of the drawers in the back. Layers of Fear has a great atmosphere, but you may have to overlook a lot of design choices to immerse yourself in what ends up an experience just over three hours long.
– MonsterVine Rating: 3 out of 5 – Average
