The Layers of Fear 2023 review will focus on the remake and repackaging discussed above and is not a new game in its own right.
It feels like only yesterday that I was playing the original Layers of Fear, a first-person explorer that spun an inventive scare from an everyday theme – the terrible toll that pursuing art inevitably takes on the shoulders of those who are talented enough to realise their dreams. That’s not to say there aren’t only a few artists diagnosable with artistic obsessive compulsion disorder, for art and its creation can be as creatively rewarding as it is creatively driving its initiators mad.
Layers of Fear tells the story of three silent protagonists. The Painter, obsessed with producing the perfect portrait; the thespian, the disgraced thespian hand-picked for the starring role in a new feature film; and the writer, a new story that ties the previous two together. Each tale takes you to a different haunted locale, be it an abandoned lighthouse, a dilapidated family home, or a film set on a cruise ship.
Psychological horror games often rely on getting inside the head of their protagonists, building empathy and then shattering it a few too many times, making them relatable and then breaking down that relatability and watching you squirm at the awful things you see them do. It’s quite clever, really. What I didn’t realise until writing this is that Layers of Fear and its sequel are, in their own way, equivalents to the countless movies that focus on the crimes of famous serial killers.
They don’t look like it on the surface, but I’ve always found Layers of Fear to be strikingly similar to movies like Zodiac and Zodiac Killer, stories fixated on the pursuit of answers by normal people in the wake of these sudden, senseless (seeming) events. Beautiful and creative, we see them at their worst – dashing off prematurely compiled manifestos about their obsessions, or maddening debates with law enforcement officers about who, or what, could possibly be at the heart of these terrible series of events. The first, the new Crysis trilogy, played this unusually close to the chest, and was in itself spin-off to highly regarded earlier horror games, making for an excellent remake (or perhaps retelling of the new Nightmare for the Dying – it’s hard to say whether it’s a new game or a sequel).
That’s not to say the Layers of Fear games are any less authentic than David Fincher’s movies, but the comparison was so fresh in my mind during my preview of the Silent Hills 2 remake that the connections started jumping out at me everywhere. Now that sequel is out, of course, and the original Layers of Fear is over seven years old, I wondered if it might be time for its own remake. It turns out that, yes, indeed it was, and we’re reviewing the results right now.
Layers of Fear 2023 was developed with the help of Anshar Studios and Bloober Team, and published by Bloober Team SA. I played the PC version on my trusty i7-7820X, GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER, 16GB RAM, and Ryzen 9 5900X, RTX 4080, 64GB RAM.
It’s been reimagined by the same team that recently remade Silent Hill 2 – Scott Joplin, Moira Foe, and anyone else that I may have missed in my haste. Omitting the Silent Hill 2 sequel in favour of a new tale, Layers of Fear tells three stories this time round. Each of them concerns an artist operating in their chosen medium – painting, acting, and writing – and their descent into madness as they interact with different locations, works of art, and things that go bump in the night.
The first tale, The Painter, was inspired by 2014’s PT demo for the cancelled Silent Hills. As such, it feels remarkably similar to it – an amateur painter roams an abandoned gallery, trying to piece together new paintings in his own style from parts of old masterpieces stashed about the place. It’s the first effort of our three outcasts, and its sleepy seaside town populated by mannequins remains perhaps the most iconic location from the first Layers of Fear. The gallery itself has undergone a transformation, with a hitherto absent fifth floor now present and its numerous inhabitants explored in The Actor’s tale.
The second story, The Actor, disappointed me on first playthrough – though only because I was approaching it without the knowledge that it was a spin-off