A masterpiece of horror… about a masterpiece of horror?
To be trapped forever by your own tortured psyche: surely there’s no worse fate possible? It looks like Layers of Fear is really going to put that to the test. It’s oozed it sway out of the collective psyche of indie developer Bloober Team, and, if the Xbox preview version we’ve played is anything to go by, it’s an ambitious, clever and strangely beautiful horror game.
Layers of Fear is, for want of a better term, a first-person walking simulator – but one that takes you on a jaunt through gothic romance and ghosts. It does so via the twisted insanity of a once great artist, a man now seemingly stuck exploring his own creaking mansion and in a quest to create one last great painting through very dubious means.
There’s some truly fantastic design on display here, with recurring themes subtly set up early on (rats, alcoholism, fire, memory, reflections) that are drawn further out as you explore the house. Each turn you take around the once-grand family home renders it increasingly grotesque, as you begin looping back on yourself and revisiting the same rooms, gradually losing any grip on what is and isn’t real. The whole environment can change with just a move of the camera. Turn around and you may find the room is totally different – a fountain of broken dolls heads may have erupted, for example. Shudder.
There are little clues scattered throughout the house – mainly in the form of old diary entries and newspaper articles – that hint at a horrible backstory involving disfigurement and obsession, but they can be tough to find. Almost every drawer and cabinet can be opened using analogue tweaks as surrogate hands, but most of them don’t have anything inside. It would be nice to find the pieces of story more often.
You’re also plagued by ghosts in some fun jump shocks, though the antagonist we’re more worried about is a sinister and hulking pursuer (who may or may not represent yourself ) who appears a couple of times, dragging his feet with a heavy step. Although Layers of Fear is a strictly non-combat game, the sense of real danger could be easily ramped up a bit if he made more frequent showings. We’d happily settle for the vague threat of him, with those footsteps heralding his arrival like the stomp of a T-rex rippling water.
Layers of Fear does tend to lean on horror clichés, too. It is, after all, pretty standard for murderers and/or psychopaths to daub their thoughts over the walls – but you would have thought that in a painter’s house it would be done a bit more creatively. That aside, this is shaping up really well, with excellent use of sound, colour, and movement all coming together in a very layered experience. Oh, right! Layers of Fear. Got it. Alice Bell