The mind of a tortured artist is never going to be a pleasant one. Van Gogh may have painted some rocking sunflowers but his head was full of darkness. But Van Gogh’s mind is nothing compared to the artist in Layers of Fear, and it’s his shoes and mind you’re going to step into. Welcome to the best nightmare you’re likely to have this year.
In Layers of Fear you must complete a painting, your magnum opus, and it has to be perfect. Unfortunately a creative block prevents you from finishing your masterpiece. Your studio is just one room in a large manor house and as you roam the halls and rooms searching for inspiration you are driven into deep despair and madness. Clues along the way will alert you to the fact that you’re not the sanest cuckoo in the nest anyway, but there is much more to your story. Layers of Fear steers away from the usual eeek-a-ghost-now-I’m-dead gameplay and instead presents a story-driven scenario. As your psychosis takes over your mind, what you initially perceive as your own lunacy starts to occasionally make a twisted sort of logic. Now I’ve never crossed the line from being slightly odd in the head to total madness, but it seems reasonable that things you experience during a psychotic break would make sense to you, even if they don’t to anyone else. Layers of Fear cleverly captures this and gives you a terrifying glimpse of a dark and diseased mind.
Although there is no fear of player death, Layers of Fear is still a chilling experience. Even on a nice sunny day, that house with its creaking floorboards and ominous but perfectly innocent dark corners is enough scare most normal people. But in the dark with a storm rumbling and your creative mind doing backflips, it’s terrifying. There’s a hint of a Lovecraftian nightmare with hallways that lead back to where you started and a general feeling that you’ve stepped into a monstrous dimension. Think P.T. on a much grander scale and that’s what you’ve got here. Doors suddenly slam shut, floors collapse, walls melt away and paintings do much more than merely seem like they’re watching you. Every step is a potential jump scare and every unlocked door is a passage to yet something else that’s going to test just how high-pitched you can scream. Even just walking across the room, trying a locked door and turning back is likely to result in brown trousers.
Games that are more about exploring and discovery tend to need a bit of legwork. Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture springs to mind, where you’re wandering about trying to uncover a story and a mystery by triggering events. Layers of Fear is along these same lines, but getting lost is not an option as the exploration element is incredibly intuitive. You have an entire mansion to explore but its openness is a bit of an illusion. The environment reacts to your presence and will change accordingly. If you find yourself doubling back, it’s because the game wants to push you that
Review - ps4
BY SJ Hollis
46