Pep's Season of Spooks - Game 19
I was hoping that this remake/mash-up of the first two Layers of Fear games would fix some of the issues that I have with the originals. Sadly, they still seem to be there, with the new content simply adding new issues.

The framing device that holds the stories together has you play a writer tasked with writing a biography for the tragic Painter of the first LOF game, that is then adapted to a film in which the Actor of the second game plays the painter. Each of the three character’s stories are connected by a mysterious “rat queen” who seems to have granted them success at the cost of their sanity. There are also a couple of side stories included, including the Inheritance DLC (that focuses on the daughter of the Painter) and two new stories. One of these sections is good (the story of the Musician rivals that of the original LOF) and the other is not so good; the Final Prologue DLC, added for Halloween, has you play the director of an increasingly chaotic film set.

While the new Unreal 5 engine give the games a glossy new coat of paint, this is still the same old Layers, for better or for worse. While I’ve always rather liked Layers of Fear’s haunted-house style of storytelling (I’ve said before that I don’t consider “walking simulator” to be an insult), it works much better in shorter bursts. I did find myself getting rather fatigued towards the end of the game. This new remake was an opportunity to trim the fat and remove some of the original game’s more tedious sections but I don’t feel like they did enough and some of the pacing, especially in the Actor’s story, feels a bit too slow. Sadly they did remove that section from LOF’s baby chapter (I blame Jerma).

Some more thoughts on each section of the game:

The Painter/Daughter/Musician’s stories: Still by far the strongest of Bloober Team’s games, with the Musician’s story being added to complete the trio of the family’s tragic tales. As well as being the most narratively coherent of Bloober Team’s games, the original Layers is also still the scariest, with an unmatched atmosphere and some jumpscares that still get me even after several playthroughs. Games where you wander around spooky old mansions/castles are among my favourites so it suits my tastes perfectly. These sections are also the best-paced parts despite the Painter’s chapters being the longest in the game.

The Actor’s story: Layers of Fear 2 was around the time that Bloober Team really started to sniff their own farts with regards to storytelling, which is why the narrative this time around is more “artsy” and “ambiguous”. The entire final chapter of the story is the Rat Queen and the mysterious Director (voiced by the legendary Tony Todd) waxing poetic and it feels utterly meaningless, since by that time the story has gotten so up-its-own-arse that you just want the mystery wrapped up. It’s also nowhere near as scary as it needs to be, with atmosphere and well-crafted scares replaced with long drawn-out walking sections and tedious chase sequences. On the plus side, there are a few neat little movie references dotted throughout, and the fact that you can now defend yourself against the “formless man” that stalks you throughout the game makes the chase sequences a little more bearable.

The Final Prologue DLC is pretty nothing. It feels like it’s comprised of ideas that were cut from LOF2 and doesn’t really add anything to the game’s overall story, without being scary either. It’s also pretty funny how the film set is supposed to be in America but all of the voice actors are quite clearly Polish. One of my criticisms of the whole game is that a lot of the voice acting is quite poor overall. Many of the letters and documents that weren’t voiced in the original Layers of Fear are voiced now, but they really needn’t have bothered.

My other big problem with the game is that the “rat queen” really isn’t a compelling enough villain to care about her. It feels like she’s being set up as this terrifying, powerful supernatural force when all you really see of her is a few flashes in jumpscares, the incredibly confusing neutral ending of LOF2 and the pretty silly painting that is omnipresent throughout the game. She hasn’t been set up enough for us for it to be a big shock that she’s behind the madness of the characters. The Writer's story didn't really interest me in general. You spend very little time playing as her and don't get enough time to know her at all. Even the gloomy lighthouse setting didn't interest me, and a place like that should absolutely be up my alley. The framing device feels tacked on in general and maybe could have even done without it.

To be honest, this didn’t need a remake. It would have been less work and more enjoyable to remaster the two original Layers of Fear games and include The Final Note as a bonus DLC. The changes that Bloober Team made are mostly negative and the new content simply isn’t worth the price.

Scary Rating 6/10 - Overall Rating 6/10

Bloober Team seems to really love their Layers of Fear series because they thought it was big and important enough to remake both games and tie them into each other with a third overarching story. If either game was confusing enough, nothing is cleared up in the story, and it all comes together to feel mostly poetic, vague, and abstract. While the writer's overarching story makes sense as she's trapped in the lighthouse that was meant to be an inspiration, the painter's or actor's stories aren't improved much if at all.

Trying to describe Layers of Fear is a challenge unto itself, as the gameplay is about as abstract as the story it's trying to sell. The game is full of excellent visual effects, disappearing acts, illusions, the opening and closing of many doors, jump scares, and anything else you can think of to make a game feel like a lot is happening when really nothing is. The game is all flash with no substance, and the remake didn't do anything to change this. It leaned into the flash at full tilt thanks to the Unreal Engine 5 upgrade and ray tracing. It looks pretty (mostly in the first game, The Painter's Story), and that's about all this game has going for it. I thought it would be scarier to push the supernatural themes a bit more, but instead, Bloober chose to just give us an enemy that can hurt us in each story, but it doesn't add anything. They are slow; you can run from them, and you can also banish them with light, but they come back.

Layers of Fear came out when P.T. clones were rampant. You start out in a seemingly harmless house with rooms you can walk into, the bare sound of ambient noise in the background, lights flickering here and there, and drawers and cupboards you can open. You end up wandering around the first house a bit until you discover the painting room and dive into the first chapter. There's a lot of narration in the background, disembodied voices, and notes you can pick up and read to help with context and exposition. Every interactive object has a white circle over it, and you can twist it, pull it, and turn it. Essentially, Layers of Fear is a Bop-It® simulator in disguise, but I digress.

There are rarely any puzzles to challenge you. There might be a large hub with doors that branch off and you need to get an object from each room, or there might be a code you need, but they are always right in front of you by opening a door or looking at the correct object. Layers of Fear's only challenge is not getting bored to death because the story is too busy trying to be poetic and pretentious over telling something interesting. Once you've opened the 100th door, most may turn the game off, especially when no other gameplay is introduced outside of crouching in the second story. Sure, the second story has fewer illusions and parlor tricks and feels more like an adventure, but I also understand the painter's story is a trip through madness and insanity, but you sure wouldn't be able to tell if it weren't for the visual rollercoaster.

I even felt the DLC from the first game didn't add anything known as The Inheritance. It was 45 minutes of frustrating mazes that didn't deliver anything new or exciting. The new DLC called The Final Note is just more of the same without giving us anything unfamiliar or appealing in the slightest. Even the overall story for the writer that's supposed to tie all of this together is very short, linear, and completely unnecessary in the long run. With two games to get through and the second story being much less interesting, I don't see many players finishing this at all.

There are collectibles in each game that can get you achievements, but many are easy to miss. If you don't look at the right object, open the wrong door, or just walk past something, you can miss it. They don't give any additional facts, story bits, or anything noteworthy, so outside of achievement hunting, there isn't a reason to do this. I honestly would have preferred an entire third entry rather than a remake after spending around 2 hours in each story. The game just becomes a slog of cheap thrills and poor storytelling.

The visuals are a treat at least, but for some reason, they don't look as good when you get to the second story, which is Layers of Fear 2. I'm not sure if it's because the graphics are just more plain here. Things are less colorful and trippy and are a bit more grounded, but the first story looks so good with great lighting effects and better textures. Once I finished the first story, I did look forward to what was happening with the writer's chapter, but these segments are so short and don't give us any more meat for this already scrawny game.

Overall, Layers of Fear is a remake no one asked for. Remaking an already mediocre and mostly bad sequel and trying to tie it together with a half-assed third story just doesn't work. We get the first game's DLC that feels pointless, a new DLC that feels aimless, and monster chases that are now dangerous but don't need to be. The game is barely a horror title. Without the lighting effects done the way they are, you wouldn't know. I didn't ever feel scared; there were occasional moments of urgency, but that's about it. The stories are convoluted hollow shells that do a bad job of telling a story in a game that you feel imprisoned in with no gameplay, and the only thing to look forward to is the story. This should have been a third game and not a remake.

I really like Layers of Fear from 2016 and I think that Layers of Fear 2 is little worse, but still good. And this one... well, it's a remake of LoF 1 & 2 made on Unreal Engine 5. There are only 2 reasons for this one to exist - to make people buy the same game one more time and to finally port the series to Xbox Series and PS5. Although I can't argue with the second reason, the first one seems odd to me. There are additional animations like hand animation for main characters and all, new animation is a good thing, no doubt. But apart from that graphics look only a little better and I'd say the only thing you will really notice is lighting. It's not entirely different from original, but IT IS different and while the game looks a bit better with new graphics there is an issue. Both LoF 1 & 2 (especially 1) are based on psychodelic experience and you can never guess what is happening behind you until you turn around. The room can change drastically. And with the new lighning, even if you turn ray tracing off... well, the experience is just broken. There is A LOT of moments where you can say that the room behind has just changed being 100% sure about it even if you haven't played the original games. Here's how it works: you explore the room and there's only one door left to check to find your way out of the room. You go to that door, you touch the handle... and in that exact moment you can see that the lighting on the door has changed. Warm light could become cold, the lightning source could be moved from left to the right side and you can see it clearly. You know perfectly well, that the room won't be the same once you turn around and that ruins everything because you must not know what will happen the next second after you touch the door, but you do.

Now let's talk about every part in details. Starting with the writer story. This content is new, it has never been seen before and... it's dull. There's no real story behind it, it feels like a stub to find a reason how to connect two original plots in the new game. There's a writer, she moves into a lighthouse because she believes it will help her to write a book. All we know about her is that she likes lighthouses, her son and she has problems with writing. That's it. We will never know why she loves lighthouses, who and why kidnapped her son in the middle of the story (if someone ever did that, I don't know, there's no explanation) or what exactly she wrote before. She's in the game to show us that the painting from the first game is not a regular painting and to tell us that "hey, it was her, who wrote the other stories". But the second game already had the reference to the first one showing us that these games have same universe, why making both characters fictional? Or were they still real? I don't know, because from the in-game notes it seems like it was the writer who created the plot twist about painter's daughter, but you can't say for sure if these characters are completely fictional... This story takes 30 minutes at best and ends with nothing for real, just like "well, you've finished our other stories, so we'll just live writer there and give you the credits screen". Bruh...

The painter story. Well, that's the one that makes me upset the most. It's not an original "psychodelic walking simulator-horror" any more, it's more like "you're stuck in a maze with monster game". And there was no running from monster in the original game! They also added the new 'Alan Wake'-like mechanic where you can make monster disappear with light for like 10 second. So why adding the monster if you can't basically die from him? There's only one moment where you won't be able to stop monster fast enought and she will kill you, but guess what - that is the same one exact moment where you meet the monster in the first game. So... no difference there, why adding the monster and all the mazed where you have to find keys/code pieces/gears while running in circles? It breaks the horror. This and the disappearance of like half of psychodelic moments. No knives screamer (I liked it!), no painting moving towards you on the ceiling and no almost HALF OF THE FINAL ACT SCENES. And that's only what I remember so far, there are many more changes like these. Some key moments from original game are there, but they are changed (often - in a bad way) or you have to run through same section backwards. There are also moments you have to explicitly decide which way to choose and that inflicts on what ending you can get because you won't be able to get items from the way you didn't choose and collecting all the objects is required to get any ending except the Loop Ending, just like in the original game.

And like all these changes weren't enough to break the first game, there is an additional DLC to painter's story made exclusively for Layers of Fear 2023. It's called "The Final Note". And while "Inheritance" is a consistent extension to the original plot, "The Final Note"... contradicts the painter's story! In this DLC we play as painter's wife, the musician, who was unable to play piano anymore because she suffered from severe burns. She tries to show us the pain and struggle she experienced from becoming ugly and unloved by her own husband, locked in a single house without a chance to get out and while this might be an interesting story, there's a problem with its endings. First of all, player may choose what she will abandon: her family or her will to die. And if you choose that she will turn away from suicide thoughts, instead of finding a strength to live for her daughter (not talking about her husband, he's already weird by this moment) she will... run away from their house, forever. Leaving her husband and daughter behind. I find it strange in spite of choices I make, but that's not the worst part. The thing is... WE ALREADY KNOW WHAT SHOULD HAPPEN TO HER! The painter's story tells us exactly how she finished her path. But why would you make several endings then? Nobody would believe the freedom ending, this is just not true, it also makes like 20% of painter's story a false trash. The only way to make DLC about musician is to show the whole drama of her sick existence and NOT let player decide her destiny, it's already written!

Finally, the actor's story. This is the one that has least changes, but still. There's also a new flashlight mechanic and you use it to start animations of manekeens all around. A part of these animations were already in original LoF 2, but now you have to start them on your own. Just like the lamp from painter's story, the flashlight helps you to fight the monster. You can either freeze him for several seconds or turn into a manekeen in the last act of the story. Let's be honest, I didn't event like that they've added this monster into original LoF 2, but what's the point having it in remake if you can fight him and it's really hard to die from this? There's no reason to be afraid of something you can fight and again, the whole original LoF series is about being afraid of the unknown. Some good parts were cut off too, but there are few of them, not much difference, the only major moment I can recall is being stuck with the monster in a corridor and forced to run into a technical chamber, lock the door and deal with pressure valves quickly to avoid death.

And, finally, bugs. Sometimes game decides that I'm standing too close to something and teleport me all across the room. While playing 'The Final Note' I grabbed the note from the table and couldn't put it back after reading, just stuck with note in my hand walking all around the room being unable to touch anything else. The boy from actor's story sometimes appears in a T-pose. Also I saw some holes in the textures in painter's story.

Finally, I'd like to say that this remake or compilation of original games is just not worth your money. It's less interesting and less original than standalone versions of LoF 1 & 2, it has problems with immersion because of all these lighting issues and all the new content is either dull or pointless. It also took me way less time to finish these games because of all the cut out content and lamp mechanics. If you want to play Layers of Fear play the original Layers of Fear, Layers of Fear: Inheritance and Layers of Fear 2, these game cost less by now and they are still better than THIS game.