Layers of Fear Review (Cortez!)
Layers of Fear 2023 draws many parallels with the painter protagonist of the original Layers of Fear. In the original 2016 game, a painter loses his mind after his wife is caught in a terrible accident and he finds that the dashing of his harmonious home life impairs his ability to reach the same artistic heights he was able to achieve prior to the terrible event. Much in the same way Bloober team has been trapped in a prison of its own design, incarcerated by in own initial success and each subsequent failure. Since the release of Layers of Fear 2016, Bloober team has released the intellectually interesting but deeply flawed Observer, the flat and pretentious Layers of Fear 2, and the wholly derivative and underwhelming Blair Witch.
What was supposed to be a return to form and a coming home with a remake of Layers of Fear, instead devolves into a desperate, stabbing attempt at Bloober team reinventing the Layers of Fear mythos into something it is not and, in the process, undermining its already tenuous position as a premiere horror game developer. In short, Layers of Fear 2023 isn't worth purchasing if you already bought, played, finished and enjoyed Layers of Fear 2016. The game consists of five chapters of varying length and quality and a short, broken, unsatisfying ending. The first chapter, the Painter's Story, is simply a reinvention of the original Layers of Fear 2016 game, with a new graphics engine, better lighting effects but, oddly, only equivalent graphics presentation.
The game demands a slew of graphics technologies and graphics engine features that preempt gamers from running the title on moderately older hardware, but the title hardly looks better than its almost decade-old predecessor, built on Unity. The story and game play have certainly changed in places, although, often, for the worse. New chase scenes have been added that don't fit with the original game paradigm and the game doesn't really add new, cogent scares. This is unfortunate since Layers of Fear 2016 was excellent and the Painter's Story is the only effectively scary and atmospheric chapter within Layers of Fear 2023. Ultimately, if you've played Layers of Fear 2016, there's really nothing new here of value for returning players. If you're a new player, you're better off getting the original for half the money.
The other four chapters are parade of failed experiments, or intellectually lazy exploits that barely have any scares between all the combined portions. One chapter, the Daughter's Story is an hour-long side tale about the Painter's grown daughter, voiced badly by a wooden voice actress and possessed of a long, introspective walking simulator with exactly 0 scares. The next chapter is the Musician's Story, which is a 2-hour long tale about the Painter's wife during her mental deterioration and eventual suicide. The story, written for wine moms, deals with post-part-em depression, the feelings of inadequacy the wife felt after the accident and her growing feelings of animosity towards her husband as he tried to hold their family together, respond to her needs and focus on his tenuously successful career. Neither of the chapters add any real scares and only the Daughter's Story does much to alter the context of the Painter's Story.
The last two chapters include the Actor's Story and the Writer's Story. Actor's Story is a re-imagining of Layers of Fear 2 and it perfectly encompasses how Bloober team have misguidedly "lost the script" about what makes a good horror game. While Layers of Fear 2016 had a simple, effective, creepily atmospheric every-man premise: "A painter loses his mind after his wife is disfigured and burned horribly. His failure at his craft furthers his progression towards insanity and he eventually experiences a series of harrowing psycho-supernatural events as he feebly attempts to make amends for his mistakes", Layers of Fear 2 instead adds siblings on a ship, actors, secret societies, living mannequins, psychosis, hypnotism and about half a dozen other mismatched concepts that fall flatly on their face. Worse is that the Actor's Tale, while sometimes atmospheric only has 2-3, chase driven scares, as the game flounders about, pretending to be an Amnesia mod.
Layers of Fear 2 was a totally "skippable" title and the chapter 4 addition to Layers of Fear 2023 is no different. The walking simulator is strange and sometimes unsettling but hardly harrowing. The game lacks good scares or a cogent, seminal tale that most people can identify with, like its predecessor's grappling with the fear of losing one's mind. In short, if the Painter's Story is Layers of Fear, then the Daughter's Story can best be categorized as Layers of Therapy and the Musician's Story can be identified as Layers of Grief. The Actor's Story is at best Layers of Strange or Layers of Bizarre. None of them add to the fear felt in the first chapter, despite accounting for 2/3 of the game's play time.
The last chapter has gamers playing as a writer who lost her son and made a deal with dark powers by writing tales of misery and woe. The tales are revealed to include all the prior chapters of the Layers of Fear IP. This is a bit of letdown as Bloober Team retroactively undoes the impact of the Painter's Story to instead shove a short, minimally scary tale about Foxy Cleopatra and her dead offspring, into the center stage. Worse still is that the chapter squanders a great setting (an abandoned lighthouse) and lacks any real ending, leaving players on an unsatisfying cliffhanger that feels insulting after Bloober team shamelessly repackaged its two prior Layers of Fear titles with a scant 3.5 hours of new, scare-free experiences.
In short, Layers of Fear 2023 is a complete failure and the onus is on Bloober team to salvage its reputation. It is currently developing Silent Hill and my sincere hope is that they sidestep all the pitfalls they keep stepping into, including story pretention, extreme abstraction, cultural narratives and general focus on experimentation over solid, tried-and-true horror creation techniques. If you've played Layers of Fear 2016, you should save your money. If you've never played the original Layers of Fear 2016, you should buy that instead of this title. It'll probably be half the price. I gave this game a positive review but only because I have an unsettling feeling that Bloober team will eventually de-list the original Layers of Fear 2016 game and we'll all be left with only this pale reproduction.
In that eventuality, I recommend playing through the Painter's Story and maybe the Daughter's Story and then quickly uninstalling.
7/10.
A let down. Silent Hill is their last chance...