Layers of Fear
It’s frights, all the way down
Developer BlooBer Team Sa publisher aSpyr price $ US19.95 AVAILABLE At Steam layersoffear.com/
Layers of Fear takes its time building up its scares, but when they do start coming, they will leave a serious tingle at the base of your spine, and an urge to sleep with the light on. And it delivers those scares with an amazingly light touch.
When the game starts, you – the player, taking on the role of the game’s main character – are more or less in the dark. There’s no pre-amble, intro scene, or text-crawl – you’re at the door of a house, that’s it. You need to puzzle every last detail out via exploration – who you are, when the game’s set, what you do… it’s all there, but needing to learn it makes it all seem remarkably intangible. Even before the game gets seriously creepy, you feel adrift, lost in your own home.
What you learn is reasonably simple: you’re an artist, and your wife is a suddenly successful pianist. There’s possibly a child, too, if the creepy and empty children’s room is anything to go by. The notes from husband to wife hint at a certain estrangement, and then there’s the bloody marks on the floor…
What becomes immediately apparent is that something is very, very wrong. There are empty wine bottles everywhere, ominous smears of gaudy paint, and while the notes from your wife are prolific, where is she?
And then there’s the painting, your apparently greatest work. And, as if this all weren’t mystery enough, just when you think you’ve got a handle on things… well. The house starts to change around you; doors lead to corridors that weren’t there a moment ago, rooms switch around,
There’s possibly a child, too, if the creepy and empty children’s room is anything to go by
and mysterious messages appear… Soon enough you begin to realise that perhaps the most terrifying thing in the house isn’t something external, it’s you.
Layers does all this with a very limited control scheme – you can walk around, and walk a little faster. You can pick up and examine some items, or open and close doors and cabinets. In the one concession to physics in the game, doors need to be swung open, not merely clicked upon, and while this sounds like a little thing, the extra bit of control it gives you sets you up nicely for what is, otherwise, a more or less on rails experience. The game is most definitely interactive – there’s a mystery to be explored, and as you return to your workroom and the mysterious painting with the end of each chapter, you’ll gather notes and clues around the room, and get closer to completing the gloomy painting, which gets stranger and stranger.
This isn’t a game about running away from fear, or confronting monsters. In the spirit of some of the greatest horror stories of all time, it’s about the monsters we carry within us. There are some mighty fine jump-scares in the game (my cat will never forgive me), but Layers horror is, at its best, morbidly psychological. It’s a great example of a truly refined and tightly controlled story-telling.