You can feel it reaching for something higher at times, as evidenced by some of the visually striking screenshots, but in the end just as it pays lip service to great ideas in horror and cinema while failing to anchor its own. Layers of Fear 2 is a bloated beast, its early chilling atmosphere replaced by an attempt at psychoanalytical storytelling it doesn’t quite know how to handle. We get it, the loops represent the obsessiveness of a broken and brilliant mind, but where the original harnessed this into a concise narrative, here it’s not delivered with the same presentational focus. Act 3 takes this to tortuous extremes, as you crawl through a vent four (or is it five?) times to drop into different rooms in your warped, wooden childhood home. Completing each act sets you back in your cabin, piecing together a story about why your character is the tortured thespian they are. Like the original, Layers of Fear 2 is a game of loops. Holy crap, I was basically in stitches too. The room with the shadow plant and taps, or the flare cannons dotted around a pirate ship, may just drive you over the edge with their lack of direction. So around the 13 or 14 minute mark, when Jerma starts breaking down laughing again, he eventually gets to a point where it looks like he's gonna start crying from how much the laughter hurts. Others are so inane and frustrating that they hark back to the dark ages of '90s adventure game puzzle logic. Some puzzles, like the slide projectors that manifest items and doors on eerie monochrome screens work well enough, while keeping with the tone and theme of the game. The first act does a good job of building tension and setting a tone, but the early good work gets derailed in subsequent acts, which take place in dull environs and introduce a litany of pace-tripping puzzles. The confusing chaos of the horror sequences is overshadowed by segments where nothing much happens at all. It breaks the mould to occasionally treat us to striking scenes in Deco lobbies, creepy screening rooms and fantasy pirate lands from a child’s imagination, but its struggle for stylistic consistency dulls the horror. It’s like the work of a hyperactive horror fan who can’t get their rampant thoughts into place.Įven the title cards for each act, stylishly drawing on horror styles ranging from '20s vaudeville to '70s Kubrick and '80s Argento, feel meaningless, tying in tenuously at best into the game’s scatty themes of acting and identity. The optical illusions get replaced by an endless supply of mannequins that either stand around in movie-like scenes or jolt out of nowhere to contort into unseemly shapes, and you’ll witness scenes ripped straight from horror classics like The Shining and Ring with zero context. Subsequent acts get drowned in a sea of poor pacing and flat horror movie references that lack cohesion in an already confused plot. The player must navigate through both a constantly changing Victorian-era mansion and ghastly visions of the painter’s fragile and crumbling psyche. Players take control of a painter whose sole purpose is to finish his Magnum Opus. But it struggles to keep up the momentum across its 9-10 hour play time. Layers of Fear is a first-person psychedelic horror game with a heavy focus on story and exploration.
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