Layers of Fear Review (smrdis)
I'm really mad Bloober Team was able to make one of my favourite games of all time. And no, I'm not talking about Layers of Fear. I'm talking about Silent Hill 2 remake. It honestly really confuses me that a studio capable of making an absolutely masterpiece of a game can publish crap like Layers of Fear. I played the first game and thought, yeah this is kinda boring, story is uninteresting, very badly executed. But yk, atleast the enviroment is pretty cool. Unfortunately Bloober Team absolutely butchered the only things I liked from Layers of Fear 1.
This game is essentially a mix of the second and first game with an additional story, so let's start with the implementation of the first game. As I mentioned, everything I liked about Layers of Fear 1 was pretty much gone here. Enviroments? From pretty cool and mysterious to just weird and boring. Gameplay? The first game introduced almost no gameplay, like 2 puzzles in the entire game and as far as I remember a single monster that can't even do anything to you. And overall it's just a walking simulator with random echoes of the past on top. However the second game made this even worser. ""Hmm, let's add a monster to serve as a threat to the player to make them more scared. Yes! This is it!"" - said probably someone in the development stages of this game. So if you're adding a monster that can "kill" the player, then why the fuck give the player a flashlight that can easily kill the monster temporarily. On top of that it doesn't even kill you, it just teleports you to a different room and when you exit it you can easily continue playing. None of the areas with your wife (the monster) were scary and adding her just made it more annoying. Any attempts to make this game scarier just straight up fail. It claims to be psychological horror but the only thing that's supposed to make me scared are the random (and unsuprisingly not scary) jumpscares, plus the active threat that also wouldn't be scary visually even if you removed the stupid mechanics to stun her.
Another thing I hate about the painter's story is the way it's presented to the player. The game is FULL of useless notes and echoes of the past that are supposed to explain to you the story and the characters. But there is literally zero reason for me to read trough all the letters because nothing in the game encourages it, at first i thought some of them contained clues to some of the puzzles but as it turned out no. So after that I just gave up, since most of the letters contained absolutely useless information even story wise. So why the fuck should I read trough them then? The echoes are pretty much the same thing. Just random stuff and it gets boring really quickly. Like why did the developers not think of attaching something to the notes or echoes to make the player actually want to collect them?
I think the painter's story had so much potential but it was wasted in every single aspect. Paintings and old victorian buildings can be terrifying to me but the only thing that scared me atleast a little was the stupid painting of the hairy baby. The developers just didn't bother to exploit these kinds of fears and unsettling feelings.
So overall if i summerize the painter's story it's basically just a walking simulator, full of useless and pretty boring stuff, puzzles that are so occasional that i think there were more solar eclipses in this decade than puzzles in the game.
Let's move on to the second story, the writer. I didn't actually finish playing this one, but I'm not sure I want to. At first I thought that it might be different, not just a walking simulator and probably a better story too. I was very wrong. Currently we are still on one place unlike the other two stories, which may actually make this worse. Again, barely anything is happening. All the time I spend in the story is just going over to every room to check what I can interact with so I can progress. Lazy jumpscares, enviroment isn't scary at all and gets boring really quickly since every time the game puts us back in the writer's story we are still in one "apartment" near a lighthouse. Most bad stuff is just the same from the writer's story, honestly barely any improvement whatsoever.
Now for the final story, this has a lot common with the painter's story. It's again just a walking simulator full of notes and echoes of the past, barely any puzzles at all, once again we are given a flashlight that has some kind of special feature, at this point it's just not interesting anymore. Despite me being in the beginning of this story I'm already bored. All of the voicelines that try to sound super deep sound so fucking cringe. Again I'm too annoyed and bored to sit trough all the echoes of the past that you can hear with random items, and to read all the notes scattered around. Most of them had zero actual information about the story and literally none of them give clues for the puzzles or how to progress. So yeah pretty much the same as the painter's story. The only thing I like is the enviroments, they geniuenly have potential to be scary or atleast to be fun, but literally everything I mentioned earlier make them just as boring.
I can definitely see a lot of insipiration from Silent Hill games and I'm glad that Bloober Team contains fans of the series since Silent Hill 2 remake came out really great. So maybe it's good Layers of Fear is fucking terrible because maybe they learned from their mistakes and made Silent Hill 2 remake a masterpiece. I did have really high hopes for Bloober's games because of the remake, but after this I'm definitely only gonna play Silent Hill remakes from them, because maybe that's the only type of game they are able to make.