Environments change within moments of you looking away, it's so well done and used in a way that has set the bar quite high for other psychological horror games. Layers of Fear has perfected the art of "That wasn't like that a second ago". Endless corridors that lead to nowhere, but turn around and it's like you never even left. What began as a seemingly normal game turned into an MC Escher-hell (in a good way). Rooms seem to explode around you, their furnishings violently blasting out at all angles. Paintings fly off of walls just as you're about to walk past them, or they could melt into something distorted and abhorrent right before your eyes, and I don't mind in admitting that I jumped and cringed on more than a few occasions. While the music is gentle with calm piano keys, it's interspersed with a situational screeching of strings to help shock you at certain moments. I loved the way the game played with my head.
It's pretty safe to say that by the time we start the game, he lives alone, maybe with a housekeeper who tries to clean up after him and his plainly alcoholic tendencies.
(Much of the story is left pretty ambiguous and the developers prefer for people to make their own conclusions.) Locking himself away for long periods of time, he neglected his family for the sake of his work. Perhaps he could no longer deal with the fact his family was no longer 'beautiful'. The painter then seems to lose his marbles completely. Then something happened to his daughter, leaving her disfigured. Something has happened to his wife, leaving her wheelchair bound, which enraged the painter so badly that most of the his correspondence devolved into harassing medical experts. His works were once likened to Caravaggio, but his fame had begun to wane.Īs the painter stumbles around this ancient and vast Victorian house (and if my ears don't lie, you can tell he has a limp from the walking sound effect), we find letters, pictures and notes which help develop the story. Once in a seemingly normal relationship, we learn he had a wife and a child, but by the time we come into the game, neither are now in the home. Since the player controls the painter, we experience his mental disturbances with him. But as we make progress through the game, and we assist him in his creation of his greatest work, we start pulling back the layers and discovering that maybe this guy isn't pretending. The introduction to the game describes how the unnamed painter is currently in the middle of some kind of court case, his lawyer implores him to stop pretending to be insane. It would make for a pretty soulless experience to just explore and only hit the same button every time you wanted to look into the contents of a drawer, so this control method helps immerse the player further, in my opinion. Before long, I got used to it, and it began to make sense to control things in this way. Then you must use the stick to mimic the movement of the object you wish to use, like opening doors. The right trigger is your action button, but this is only one-half of fulfilling an action. To begin with, controlling Layers of Fear felt very awkward.
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