Before I started playing 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Layers of Fear, I was confused about what it even is. Given that the new release from Anshar Studios and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Bloober Team shares a title with the serie🐼s’ first entry from 2016, you might expect a remake or a reboot. It’s kind of both, with a sequel wrapped in too.
This new package contains both previous games in the Layers of Fear series. Each has been remade in Unreal Engine 5, and looks gorgeously grimy as a result. It also contains a new epilogue for the first game and a remade version of its Inheritance DLC. All of this is contained within a framing story in which you play as a writer on a retreat in an abandoned lighthouse. If you play the story mode, it serves up both games as a single continuous campaign, with the writer's narrative interspersed throughout.
It's an odd approach, but it seems like an evolution of what Bloober did with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Observer: System Redux. On the surface, that 2020 next-gen upgrade appeared to be a simple remaster of Bloober's 2017 first-person cyberpunk adventure game. But, when you played it, you found a deeper reworking, one that attempted to fix that game's rough second half and added new side quests, in addition to the usual bells and raytraced whistles. Layers of Fear takes this approach further, attempting to combine the entire series into one 10-12 hour game, with new mechanics that keep the gameplay more active throughout. You can also access all of this individually from a Chapters menu, but the games are, bizarrely, named for their protagonists — Painter's Story, Actor's Story, etc — not the official titles. It’s a strange choice, but understanding what exactly Layers of Fear (2023) is is the first step to evaluating whether it’s any good.
The short answer is that parts of it are very good and parts of it suck. I reviewed Layers of Fear 2 back in 2019. I liked it then, I still like it now, and the changes the devs have implemented make this the definitive version. But this was my first time playing the original Layers of Fear, which is a fairly miserable experience. It's only about three hours long, so that wouldn't be too big of a deal if the rest of this package built on Layers of Fear 2's foundation. But, most of it is cut from the Layers of Fear cloth.
Both games were pretty mechanically barebones in their original incarnations. You walk through an eerie location and your only means of interaction is picking up notes and other objects strewn about the setting, as well as opening doors and drawers. That's basically it, though this reworking also allows you to play defense against the apparitions pursuing you by pointing a lantern (in the first game) or a flashlight (in the second) until they burst, putting them out of commission for a few seconds. Layers of Fear 2 uses this addition to greater effect. Its cruise ship setting is filled with ghostly mannequins, many of which are paused in the middle of performing an action. Holding your flashlight on them causes them to spring to life, leaping forward with a knife, falling over a railing, moving an obstacle, and a variety of other things. So, while LoF2's baddie is chasing you, the game tasks you with solving seconds-long puzzles by shining the light on the mannequins to clear a path. It adds a bit more thought to the game's chase scenes, which were already better than most pursuit sequences in combat-less horror games.
The experience is uneven across the separate stories, which makes the whole thing feel especially disconnected, given its presented as one complete game. While each story is improved by the move to UE5, no amount of graphical fidelity could make the decrepit mansion of the first Layers of Fear a place I want to spend any amount of time. It's oppressively dim, your character moves at a snail's pace (even when running), and the game's approach to horror is antithetical to the satisfaction of exploring a space. All of the Layers of Fears games have moments where you walk into a room, hit a dead end, turn around, and find that the world behind you has changed. The first Layers of Fear hits this note over and over and over again. It's an attempt to destabilize the player, but when you're constantly destabilized, it loses its effect, and as a result the first game slogs along in an unpleasant equilibrium.
Layers of Fear 2 improves on this significantly. Its setting, a cruise ship where your actor protagonist has gone to work on a film with a demanding director, is far more interesting, with gleaming brass, shining mahogany, and richly furnished rooms. It plays the "turn around and the room has changed trick" too, but it spends longer establishing a sense of place before the rug pull. One chapter has you returning to the same location over and over, and throughout the game you’re given more time to explore. It's story lands better too, with strong vocal performances from its two leads Coco Lefkow and James Watts as two children whose experiences on the ship you discover through ghostly flashbacks. Layers of Fear has much more voice acting — every note you find is performed — but the performances are uniformly weak, and it drags the game down.
As much as I like Layers of Fear 2, most of the collection isn't Layers of Fear 2. Inheritance casts the player as the Painter's daughter returning to their haunted home once more, and The Final Note puts you in the role of her mother, the Musician, also in the same house. Inheritance is the better of the two, with some inventive visuals in flashbacks to the girl's youth, where everything is much larger than your child-sized perspective. But both borrow the gameplay of Layers of Fear, and that makes the haunted house feel less like a familiar location you're returning to once again and more like a series of corridors strung together with dream logic.
The problem is that everything in Layers of Fear (2023) seems to be taking cues from the first game, not the second. The Writer's frame story and both pieces of DLC share the first game's approach to ubiquitous, weak voice acting, and both pieces of DLC return to the unpleasant mansion setting. Layers of Fear 2 should have been an evolution for the series that informed what Bloober and Anshar Studios built here, but that isn't the case. Maybe it's fitting, after all, that this collection shares the first game's name.
A title that reimagines its two predecessors and builds upon them, Layers of Fear is described as a 'first-person psychedelic horror' title that puts the player in the middle of a tense, immersive story. It has been built in Unreal Engine 5 for high-definition consoles and PC by Bloober Team.
