Is it possible to create a terrifying piece of horror media without the threat of death? When you think about it, there hasn’t been a single successful feature film, television show, or video game that has not predicated its tense atmosphere on the fear of something deadly befalling its protagonist(s), at least none that I can think of (and yes, I consider corporeal possession a form of death since you’re being forcibly deprived of what makes you human). Sure, you may have a disturbing scene involving someone losing (or at threat of losing) their limbs, but that’s not enough to sustain agitation on the part of viewers for the long haul (it’s why the first Saw had to frequently alter to B plots involving the police and prior victims).

But look, given the longevity of the movie industry, I’m sure I’m wrong to apply this assertion to such a long body of work. Video games though? Can you actually place gamers in a world that leaves them on edge despite the lack of fatal danger to their avatar? I personally don’t think so, and unfortunately, Layers of Fear failed to move my position on this despite that being developer Bloober Team’s intent. Focusing on a mad artist trying to paint his magnum opus, it features all the tropes necessary for a scary time: a forsaken dwelling, hallucinations, and malignant milieu, but fails to turn any of them into something consistently or mostly nerve-wracking.

All that said, it should be made clear that I didn’t need to be left screaming- the vast majority of horror stories are simultaneously mysteries since they involve uncovering some unknown secret or identity, and a thrilling yarn can yield its own rewards (I felt this way about Gothika and Secret Window). But no, Layers doesn’t achieve that either. As your unnamed protagonist makes his way through the house, choppy blasts from the past are thrown at you piecemeal, divulging dark secrets that tormented his life as an artisan, lover, and parent. And what you come to realize relatively quickly through each of these is just how of an a$$hole this guy was. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that Layers of Fear has the most unlikable main character I have ever played as (excluding choice-based RPGs), and I genuinely don’t know what the writers were thinking. On all three bearings, let me repeat, on ALL THREE BEARINGS outlined above, there isn’t a single redeeming factor about this man (whom we shall call JD for the sake of me not having to type anymore dumb placeholder monikers).

First, is the painter front- Layers takes on the “tortured artist” archetype that has been popularized to no end since the fall of Van Gogh, and chooses to double down on its stupidity without any kind of alteration or subversion. I’ve never been a fan of this motif due to mental illness not being something anyone should idealize or associate with expressiveness- we’ve all seen works where an unstable individual is shown crafting extravagantly demented oeuvres (Sander Cohen in BioShock) or exhausting themselves to the point of producing a grand psychedelic masterpiece (Black Swan), and the subtle implication has evidently been that a mental toll yields brilliance and ambition.

Layers, to its credit, doesn’t romanticize the concept since there are nothing but negative consequences to the insanity, but it still opts to utilize it purely as an excuse to indulge in psychoactive deliria. I’ve always advocated for creators having complete freedom with regards to taking any topic and exploring it to fruition, but this here is so lazy that I can’t even call it exploitative- there is no commentary on mental illness, on the stresses that capitalistic output necessitates from laborers, nothing; just exercises in phantasmagoria that have been done much better in other works (including The Simpsons of all media). The worst part is how the writers don’t even bother explaining what caused JD to succumb to hysteria beyond allusions to atypical karoshiism. That’s right- all you have is a man going crazy (or having already gone crazy depending on how you choose to interpret the story) because he got too caught up in perfecting his art. Just lame.

Second and third are the lover and parent, which I’ll talk about together since they go hand-in-hand. I should be upfront that Layers of Fear requires multiple runs in order to glean all the secrets that the developers put into the game- like literally, new info and (I believe) new dialogues are available to find during the “new game pluses.” So it’s very much possible that more supplementary material for these phases of JD’s life were provided in-game and I just didn’t experience it.

My counters here would be two-fold: one, designing a non-roguelike title to be completed more than once is beyond pretentious, thinking your product will be so great that gamers will feel compelled to go through it again and again for the sake of finding secrets that you could have just as easily released the first time; and on that note, two, I don’t think you should have to beat something more than once to acquire pertinent narrative information. Yes, I know back in the day (and even occasionally today) there were a lot of smaller indie titles that called for at least a second playthrough to uncover the “true” ending, but this was usually blatantly done to artificially elongate the game’s time, and the extra finale rarely made much of a difference. Layers of Fear, however, is a 2016 title, published in an era where such design schemes are outdated, and any extra details here could have gone a long way towards fleshing out JD’s character, thereby significantly impacting how you came away from the story.

Regardless, the plot just wasn't fun enough the first time to compel me to do it, and so I have to go by purely what I derived from that initial experience, which, to reiterate, showcased JD as a surly character who only gets worse with each data clump you mine. He’s horrible to his wife as she undergoes her own tragedies, he’s neglectful to his child; he cares only for his art, which has gotten increasingly demented as his mind cracks (alienating him from his friends who try to help him out with commissions). Even his lawyer is implied to be done with him courtesy of his temperament and illogical behavior. I wish I was exaggerating each of these, but I’m not- to dive into specifics would give away spoilers; however, just know that, again, none of it is given a cogent justification. I thought I had witnessed peak human unlikability when the protagonist of Oklahoma! sang a song urging the “antagonist” to commit suicide just so he could be with the heroine- JD makes that sociopath look nice by comparison.

Graphically, Layers utilizes the Unity engine, which, in my opinion, has always been an underappreciated rival to Unreal. Unfortunately, my praise for its usage this time around has to be restrained due to two constraints: one, it seems like Bloober took the default assets of the software without bothering to put enough of their own lacquer, and while that strategy generally works for Unreal given the deep photorealism of its core architecture, Unity’s ability to alter between lifelike verisimilitude and abstract schemas necessitates that developers commit more than normal. Layers’s problem is that, for all the macabre imagery thrown at you, it’s firmly grounded in a real-life setting: a destitute home from the early-20th century. And so, without that extra polish that grounded vistas and belongings inherently warrant, I personally couldn’t help but find a lot of the furniture and paraphernalia to have a tenuousness, almost cheapness, to their exteriors. Wood and plasterboard, in particular, were the worst, which you’ll be seeing a lot of given that they are the fundamental building materials of the manor (and, well, any house these days).

I want to stress that this is a purely subjective critique as there are a lot of reviewers, including one of my favorites GmanLives (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3KyPmyTC-4), who loved the look of the residence, and outside of fruit and plastic simulacra, I can’t deny the strong texturizing all-around. But I don’t know, having seen these exact same surfaces in past walking sims Gone Home and Dear Esther (both of which pulled them off better courtesy of occupying soft 90s vibrancy and pictorial mysticism respectively), and not seeing any perceptible variations from Bloober Team, I ultimately found it to be uncanny- it wasn’t photogrammatic or stylized enough, just a strange in-between if that makes sense.

Another big issue is the inconsistency of the lighting- when the developers want an area to be baked or manipulated in up/down refulgence, it looks solid, with the first person camera even emitting a lens flare if you stare directly at a heat source. But sadly, most of the game has you traversing darkened corridors and quarters, which are too dim even by horror standards, and required me to adjust the brightness.

Lastly, I have to note that, for a title that is centered around an occupant of the art of…art, there is a severe lack of variety in terms of the potential visuals that Layers could’ve opted to use when tossing madness your way. You tend to get either short or long digressions, both with their own issues. The former is too brief to be remembered given that you quickly revert back to your regular state of mind, which is a shame as Layers of Fear truly had the potential to be more thrilling given its dilapidated ghosthouse setting. And yet, what you’ll find is a series of ordinary rooms that only mildly alternate when hit with the Painter’s visual aberrations: sleeping arenas, foyers, kitchens, it’s all relatively stock by any decent person’s standard of living. Sure, you get some nice paintings (couldn’t tell if they were famous in real life or handmade in-game by the arthouse folks) or mounted taxidermy adorning the wall that may or may not have their eyes bleeding out the second you do a double-take, but that’s too minor to be distressing.

The longer digressions, on the other hand, bank on converting your surroundings into paint-like substances, melting or conforming at the will of JD’s degenerating consciousness. The problem is the dissolving animations tend to look out of place when applied to most of the items they’re affecting, as though they were being done on an invisible canvas ON TOP OF the environment instead of directly on the environment itself. You also get instances, particularly back in your studio hub, where multiple blobs form up, which I guess were supposed to represent paint globs but reminded me more of that black globule trap from the first Incredibles over the splodges from say Epic Mickey- that is, they were aesthetically malapropos to their purpose.

The sound design falters significantly. First and foremost, the balancing is poorly done, with the SFX being significantly quieter than the music; I had to go into the options menu and turn down the latter just to hear the former, which was not a positive sign of things to come given that a good acoustic layout is key to any successful horror enterprise. And as it turns out, this was most likely a deliberate design choice given that such aurality is minimal even with the negative volume boost- footsteps are so inconsistent, blatantly giving away the fact that you’re playing as a camera and not a pseudo-solid figure. Thunder and lightning crash outside as you move by windows, but at a far enough distance it doesn’t even register as volatile beyond generic inclement weather. Anything else, from stereotypical creaks to the minute tense noises heard when being in a house by yourself, are either omitted or so hushed as to be silent.

There are a couple of favorable traits here that deserve to be highlighted. For one, while the physics engine makes object interaction harder than it should (more on that below), there was effort put into giving a motion-based range to interactable features in the foreground like swinging cabinet doors and winding keys. Also, the din associated with jump scares (like a crashing piano or screaming baby) serves its function (though I wonder if you can even fail at programming something as easy as a screamer).

The music is fine. Arkadiusz Reikowski is clearly going for a gothic tone with his use of pianos and strings, which means altering between scenes of idyllicism and deranged nightmare fuel at the drop of a hat. I didn’t think he quite succeeded with the secondary timbre as I rarely ever felt unnerved by a shift in composition, but your mileage will vary.

Voice acting is awful courtesy of lone star Erik Braa. He reminds me of someone I once acted alongside with for a video production- the guy was so nice, that he was literally incapable of pulling off any other emotion in his delivery, from anger to disappointment. Likewise, Braa seems like an individual who is so kind he just cannot do well as an pr!ck, which is kind of a problem given my aforementioned rant about JD’s personage. He’s not even provided an option to emit the archetypal breathing and gasping a horror character naturally does whenever something panic-inducing occurs to them.

Finally, we get to the gameplay, which is minimal since Layers of Fear is a walking simulator. You have the ability to run, zoom-in, examine certain items, and engage with predesignated belongings, all things you’ll have to complete as you make your way through the game’s six “levels”. I use quotation marks because, like Dear Esther, Layers of Fear fails to give you any kind of meaningful exploration, making these escapades more akin to one of those Mario Maker stages that were purely about initiating a chain reaction and watching the results unfold than actually participating. And though you are mostly given time beforehand to amble around the spaces, my aforestated point in the graphics section about the lack of artistic virtuosity renders them not worth looking at- you wouldn’t believe the amount of cupboards and drawers I opened only for there to be literally nothing in them: no Easter Eggs, no new secrets, nada. When it comes to storage spaces, Layers of Fear violates Chekhov's gun to the extreme.

In terms of the quality of the reactions, well, let’s just say that I was not surprised to learn that Bloober Team was the same company behind Observer (in fact, during a break in my playthrough, I took the time to go back and relook at my review of it- I wonder if that decision was borne out of a subconscious push!- https://www.backloggd.com/u/RedBackLoggd/review/279057/). I was not a fan of that game either, but one thing it somewhat succeeded in doing was placing the player in a menacing plane whenever Lazarski would jack into a dead person’s brain. I get the sense that the ghastly beats assailing JD in Layers were a bit of a prototype for what Bloober Team eventually did there, and the roughness of being a draft shows. As you can probably imagine, a lot of Layers’ horror takes place in them, and it'll immediately dawn on you just how repetitive the beats get as the triggers are tied to the same cues of either selecting a particular object or turning around to see a radical change in the space you were occupying ala Antichamber.

On top of this, because Layers lacks a tense atmosphere from conception, it tries to make-up for it by over-relying on shock tactics. This was already going to end badly as an exercise in cheapness, but it gets worse when you realize that even THIS component amounts to one of four instances: an object flying at you, something crashing nearby, paraphernalia suddenly melting, and the always hackneyed demonic entity screaming in your face via a sudden close-up. The second you fathom this is all you’re going to get, the terror becomes immensely predictable, and combined with my introductory assertion about a video game not being scary without the threat of death, you get a removal of the one piece of entertainment Layers had going for it.

Some reviewers have claimed that puzzles are present that change up the gameplay, but I personally don’t consider finding a combination lock and inputting it, or searching for and touching a glowing piece, intriguing enough to be considered puzzles, though they probably are by the barest of video game definitions.

Lastly, to elaborate on my issues with object interaction, Layers puts up resistance based on the direction you move your mouse in a seeming attempt to replicate how real-world push/pull physics work. I’ve admittedly never liked these kinds of systems (what exactly is wrong with a single button prompt?), but this "innovation" makes such actions even more annoying because you can’t alter your elevation (no crouch/jump), so theoretically everything should be treated as though you are at the perfect angle to move it, yet the game acts like any slight alteration from a straight horizontal swipe of the mouse is moving your hands vertically at odds with the directional swing of the door you’re pulling. And no, adjusting the sensitivity didn’t appear to affect this. Granted it’s not a huge issue overall, but it bears noting for a fair critique.

One small thing I do like was how you're able to use the WASD keys to turn an object you’re examining instead of just the mouse. But yeah, that’s about the only real notable “feat” I can claim for the gameplay.

In conclusion, it goes without saying that I did not have fun with Layers of Fear and therefore can’t recommend it. Despite having sections that don’t overstay their welcome, the central overarching narrative is mediocre with one of the worst protagonists in modern gaming history, and it isn’t even close to being scary, technically or artistically. To top all of this off, you get multiple endings based on choices so obscure, you wouldn’t know what they were unless you looked them up- not that it matters, since none of the finales makes for a satisfying conclusion. I do not recommend this game.