After PT’s release (short for ‘Playable Teaser’, a demo for the now cancelled game Silent Hills), there was a mini landslide of games both inspired by as well as imitating and jumping on it’s popularity. Some good, a lot bad. One of the games that was heavily inspired by PT was Layers of Fear, a self-described Psychedelic Horror game.
In Layers of Fear, you play as a psychologically disturbed painter who is trying to complete his magnum opus. The story is told through his deteriorating memories of every step and frustration of trying to perfect the painting, and the toll it’s taking on his family.
From the get go, Layers of Fear tries to win you over with it’s presentation. It has some decent visuals with a lot of little visual tricks and flair that differentiates it just enough from PT to not be a complete rip-off, but it just comes off as a lot shallower than it first appears.
Gameplay wise, the game is incredibly simple and repetative. It might have expanded the looping mechanic from P.T., going from a hallway to a whole house, but it does very little to expand on this mecahnic. Layers of Fear has it’s looping hallways, locked doors that force you to turn around and see that the hallway that you just walked down completely changed, and a jump scare if you get too close to the ghost of the game.
The difference between this game and PT was that PT was just a demo, and this is a whole game. And this is the best part of the game, which is one of the most backhanded compliments that I’ve given to a game ever.
Layers of Fear does have multiple endings, all of which require you to collect specific items and avoid specific encounters. This is incredibly tedious incredibly quickly, making the whole game feel like a chore. Because of the way the game tells it’s story, trying to figure out what specific items you have to collect requires brute force trial and error. And I don’t see too many people spending hours on such a shallow game digging through draws and trying to avoid certain events over and over again just to get a different ending.
The plot is very basic and it’s pretty obvious where it’s going. The only unpredictable thing is which of the 3 endings that you’re going to get. And with the constant trial and error to get to an ending other than the easiest and most obvious one is incredibly off-putting.
But that’s not where the game ends, as DLC for the game was released only 6 months after the release of Layers of Fear, titled Layers of Fear: Inheritance, and is a direct sequal to the original game. In Inheritance, you play as the painter’s daughter as she goes back to her childhood home to face her past.
I ended up liking the DLC a bit more than the main game if only for the fact that it threw away a lot of the ambiguity of the original for a more definative plot. I know that goes against the appeal of something like Layers of Fear, but the original game had far less depth that it thought it did.
Literally the only defining thing that Layers of Fear had going for it was a Halloween update that used the Ouija Board found in one of the rooms for some Easter Eggs around the October that it was released, but for some reason seems to have been patched out. It could have easily been a neat thing for players to return to every October if it was kept in.
Would I recommend Layers of Fear and it’s DLC, Inheritance? No, I wouldn’t. It’s too shallow to really stand out in the pile of PT clones, and it’s too much of a tedious slog to try and get it’s multiple endings.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/391720/Layers_of_Fear/
https://www.gog.com/game/layers_of_fear
https://www.layersoffear.com/main.html
Cult Classic Corner - Video Games 