The door slams shut, and you'll never get in there again. There are multiple situations where you can wander into a room with an optional puzzle that will be forever left unsolved when you leave the room. Voices can be heard talking behind closed doors, whispers fill the room. As Layers of Fear 2 is a game made to confound and disorient players quite regularly throughout its five-hour story mode. Victorian setting – Explore a game world inspired by masterpiece paintings, architecture and décor from the 19th century. Sound is equally as important as sight in producing effective horror, and Layers of Fear 2 uses it masterfully.Story-focused exploration – Only through exploring the environment can you uncover the details of the painter’s dark and tragic past.Original and classic art – Numerous pieces of original art and music flesh out the story and environment.Psychedelic horror – A sense of insanity means each turn of the camera may completely change the look of your surroundings.Uncover the visions, fears and horrors that entwine the painter and finish the masterpiece he has strived so long to create. Delve deep into the mind of an insane painter and discover the secret of his madness, as you walk through a vast and constantly changing Victorian-era mansion. Your Magnum Opus.ĭare you help paint a true Masterpiece of Fear? Layers of Fear is a first-person psychedelic horror game with a heavy focus on story and exploration. How long has it taken to get to this point? Too long, but it doesn’t matter. That melody… Was that a piano? It sounded just like her… But, no-that would be impossible. Your friends, critics, business partners-soon, they’ll all see. Why haven’t you done this before? It seems so obvious in retrospect. You’ve created countless pieces of art, but never anything like…this. You can feel it reaching for something higher at times, as evidenced by some of the visually striking screenshots, but in the end just as it pays lip service to great ideas in horror and cinema while failing to anchor its own.You take another drink as the canvas looms in front of you. Layers of Fear 2 is a bloated beast, its early chilling atmosphere replaced by an attempt at psychoanalytical storytelling it doesn’t quite know how to handle. We get it, the loops represent the obsessiveness of a broken and brilliant mind, but where the original harnessed this into a concise narrative, here it’s not delivered with the same presentational focus. This piece of the game involves, among other things, avoiding light sources and solving puzzles with a safe and projector. Act 3 takes this to tortuous extremes, as you crawl through a vent four (or is it five?) times to drop into different rooms in your warped, wooden childhood home. On this page of our guide to Layers of Fear 2, we have described the exploration of ship's model and further part of the vessel within the passage of act 1. Completing each act sets you back in your cabin, piecing together a story about why your character is the tortured thespian they are. Like the original, Layers of Fear 2 is a game of loops. The room with the shadow plant and taps, or the flare cannons dotted around a pirate ship, may just drive you over the edge with their lack of direction. Others are so inane and frustrating that they hark back to the dark ages of '90s adventure game puzzle logic. Some puzzles, like the slide projectors that manifest items and doors on eerie monochrome screens work well enough, while keeping with the tone and theme of the game. The first act does a good job of building tension and setting a tone, but the early good work gets derailed in subsequent acts, which take place in dull environs and introduce a litany of pace-tripping puzzles. The confusing chaos of the horror sequences is overshadowed by segments where nothing much happens at all. It breaks the mould to occasionally treat us to striking scenes in Deco lobbies, creepy screening rooms and fantasy pirate lands from a child’s imagination, but its struggle for stylistic consistency dulls the horror. It’s like the work of a hyperactive horror fan who can’t get their rampant thoughts into place.Įven the title cards for each act, stylishly drawing on horror styles ranging from '20s vaudeville to '70s Kubrick and '80s Argento, feel meaningless, tying in tenuously at best into the game’s scatty themes of acting and identity. The optical illusions get replaced by an endless supply of mannequins that either stand around in movie-like scenes or jolt out of nowhere to contort into unseemly shapes, and you’ll witness scenes ripped straight from horror classics like The Shining and Ring with zero context. Subsequent acts get drowned in a sea of poor pacing and flat horror movie references that lack cohesion in an already confused plot. But it struggles to keep up the momentum across its 9-10 hour play time.
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