Art can be beautiful, but the process of making it is almost always ugly and painful; sometimes even the stuff of nightmares. That’s the underlying message of Layers of Fear (2023), developers Bloober Team (and Anshar Studios’) “definitive way” to experience their first-person psychological horror game series, which kicked off back in 2016.
Essentially a hybrid remake-remaster, not dissimilar to what Bloober did with their cyberpunk thriller Observer: System Redux, Layers of Fear revisits the original Layers of Fear, its DLC, as well as Layers of Fear 2 (2019), and bundles them all together with a new overcharging storyline. Plus, a further new DLC for the first game, which serves as a fresh, alternate perspective on the events there. It’s not just about content refresh and extension, though. Layers of Fear (2023) has been built on Unreal Engine 5, so it has all the visual dazzle of a next-gen release, supporting ray tracing, HDR and 4K.
Honestly, Layers of Fear 1 and 2 still look good thanks to their striking production design and art direction, so the question is whether the new all-in-one rejig is worth your time? The answer is “yes.” Now offering a meaty, 15-hour non-completionist playthrough, Layers of Fear (2023) is absolutely the best way to explore these dark, unsettling tales of artistic obsession turned into desperation, guilt and madness. That said, like any artist’s oeuvre, its individual pieces are not equal in quality. And the non-linear, implication-heavy narrative, which players must piece together like a jigsaw, can be incredibly frustrating. Especially when the story is so rich in potential.
The good news first, though. The remake of Layers of Fear 1 – here called The Painter’s Story – is a legitimate masterpiece. A step up all round, this is Bloober literally adding layers to the title that first made them standouts in the psychological horror genre. Most of the old rough, paint-loaded strokes are gone, smoothed over instead with a seamless blend of oil shades that produce a more polished and emotionally potent impression.
Layers of Fear (2016) felt like a grim walking sim – though there’s nothing wrong with that. The true horror was the awfulness of the protagonist, heralded as an early 20th Century Caravaggio, who is revealed to have become increasingly unhinged and abusive to his wife and daughter as he struggled to repeat his initial career success. Layers of Fear (2023) fleshes out the family tragedy; chops away a lot of meaningless busywork of opening empty cupboards and drawers in the painter’s decaying manor; makes sense of the game’s disturbing rat sketch collectibles; and introduces more puzzles and gameplay.
Initially these new gameplay elements seem shoehorned in, and unnecessary. However, they quickly become a highlight, adding the breath-holding tension that only comes from dealing with an enemy that pursues you relentlessly and cannot be stopped, as in the Resident Evil tradition. And, well, in many player nightmares too. Speaking of Resident Evil, if Village’s House Beneviento chilled you, wait until you reach the retooled child’s rooms and related stage here.
The Painter’s Story in Layers of Fear (2023) runs the full fright gamut, from jump scares to the more ominous terror that comes from walking down a dark passageway of locked rooms, looking back and suddenly seeing one door open a crack. Adding to the emotional impact is the immersion created by the next-gen visuals and, especially, the binaural audio. While the voice acting is over-the-top at times, there is no faulting the game’s sound design, which is 10/10 perfection.
Some of Bloober’s less successful pre-The Medium content staples are present in The Painter’s Story as well – like an over-reliance on scene repeats, and in-the-moment, apparently insignificant choices that will determine the game end. However, there is at least in-game acknowledgement of the former, and the latter is better signposted this time around. For the record, regardless of which ending you reach in your main playthrough (each section of the game has a minimum of two different endings), you can experiment with different choices via the Chapters section, which sits separate from your primary game progress.
As for the new base game DLC, The Final Note (AKA The Musician’s Story) is a surprisingly raw and poignant look at depression that stems from isolating ill health and the inability to do what gives your life meaning. While the outcome is already determined, your playthrough will determine how the DLC protagonist perceives their actions, and it makes this otherwise “othered” character a lot more sympathetic.
All good so far, but it’s at this point that Layers of Fear (2023) loses its grip on the brush. While you can dive into the Musician and Daughter’s tales as optional content, The Painter’s Story leads into The Actor’s Story (AKA Layers of Fear 2), which continually fights player engagement and enjoyment. Set on board a luxury ocean liner in the first half of the 20th Century, the new Layers of Fear 2 is visually sumptuous and far more diverse in its level design than Layers of Fear 1, and it delivers some fantastic jump scares. However, it also exasperates at nearly every step.
On a technical level, while it isn’t a deal breaker thanks to potential patching, this portion of Layers of Fear (2023) crashed the game several times on my PC. The biggest problem, though, is the overall opaqueness of The Actor’s Story. Players may assemble the back story of the protagonist – a talented movie star who years previously stowed away on a ship to America with his sister to escape an abusive life in the English slums – but most of the time you struggle to make sense of what’s going on. A mentally unstable artist roaming his family home, and revisiting his memories, has an immediate immersive credibility that the premise of Layers of Fear 2 does not. In The Actor’s Story, you’ve been hired by an acclaimed director to progress through various mannequin-littered stages on board the deserted ship. There’s something to do with following orders and identity deconstruction, but it’s as impenetrable as the storm raging outside your cabin.
At around twice the length of the 4-hour The Painter’s Story, The Actor’s Story also lacks focus. It’s just too much. Becoming overwrought is one thing, but Layers of Fear 2 also seems to go bizarrely off-script. Alien artifacts make an appearance, and there’s a whole out-of-nowhere tribute to Se7en, so unveiled that you wonder why David Fincher’s lawyers haven’t come calling. That said, the movie theme of The Actor’s Story does mean several fun visual easter eggs for cinephiles, like collectible Golden Age-inspired film posters, and stumbling on a hallway straight out of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining – a definite influence on the Layers of Fear series.
Personally, I wish that Layers of Fear 2 had been left out of Layers of Fear (2023), but without it, players would lose a key contribution to the remake: the character of the Rat Queen. This deeply unsettling figure, who typically pops up in portraits, should really be a better known icon of video game horror. The Rat Queen serves as a bridge between the various stories of Layers of Fear (2023), appearing as a treacherous muse whose gifts always come with a price, and whose claws dig deep into all the tortured artists, and playable characters, in the game – the painter, musician, actor and, finally, the writer whose research into the past ties everything together in Layers of Fear (2023).
The Writer’s Story is another new addition to the Layers of Fear mix, and is centred on a horror author who wins a competition to hole up in a lighthouse and work on her magnum opus. This short umbrella narrative mirrors the successes and failures of Layers of Fear (2023) as a whole: incredibly atmospheric horror that gets under your skin, while plot chasms open beneath your feet due to a refusal to progress along timelines in a linear fashion. With The Writer’s Story, players grapple with a whole decade to fill in, with barely any clues provided to unravel the mystery. You’re still straining to achieve understanding when the game ends abruptly. The Writer’s Story, and Layers of Fear (2023) in general, start out so strong, before rushing to an unsatisfying conclusion.
As it stands, Layers of Fear (2023) as a whole ends up feeling a lot like the two-sided scale you sometimes encounter scrawled on the walls in The Painter’s Story. The game is tipped in one direction, lacking on the other side. And for the best experience I would recommend skipping that underwhelming second part.
Having released on 1 June, Layers of Fear is out now for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series consoles.
| Layers of Fear (2023) review | |
Marketed as “the definitive way” to experience the Layers of Fear game series, Layers of Fear (2023) absolutely delivers on that promise. However, while the immersive remake has elevated the first game in the series to the level of masterpiece, it’s bogged down by a buggy relook of Layers of Fear 2, an overwrought, overlong title that only displays flashes of inspiration; and an often frustrating implication-driven approach to narrative throughout the new release. |
7.5 |
| Layers of Fear (2023) was reviewed on PC | |