Layers of Fear – It’s a thin line between love and hate

To me, the hardest question on this Earth, besides the one about the meaning of life, is: Are Layers of Fear a good game? For that, I blame Japanese horror game developers and their philosophy: “If you want something to be scary, put a decent amount of blood and guts in the game. And if you want something to be twice as scary, put twice as much blood and guts in the game.” The human sense of fear, fortunately or not, doesn’t work that way.

Who was Steve Strange?

Allow me to start with a digression. Thirty years ago, in London, Mick Jagger came to the Blitz club one night. The Blitz was craving publicity, and that was a PR gift right from the heavens. But Steve Strange, the club host who was watching the door, knew that only one thing could be better than the story of Mick Jagger visiting the club: not letting Mick Jagger in at all.

If you combine the previous “blood and guts” story with this one, you will understand the problem horror games encountered over a decade ago. Developers either gave players infinite ammunition or just a few bullets and threw a bunch of monsters and zombies at them. With enough blood and guts, this was supposed to be scary, and horror games were built on that premise for years. Everything worked fine until the increasing number of zombies and gore couldn’t scare people anymore. The whole genre came to a grinding halt until someone came up with a brilliant new idea.

“Instead of giving players more and more advanced weapons and ammunition, what would happen if we gave them none at all?”

Do you have Amnesia?

Amnesia: The Dark Descent, from Frictional Games, took me by surprise. It was the first horror game that really frightened me. The first game ever where I stood for minutes in front of a dark corridor (in the game) and was too scared to go any further. With no weapons or any tools to defend myself, the horror of the game transcended from the computer screen into the space around me. In the middle of my play, I paused the game, turned the lights on, and checked if somebody was hiding on the terrace. It wasn’t long before the media coined a name for this new kind of game: psychological horror.

Amnesia was a hard-to-match masterpiece. It took three years before another “psychological horror” experience forced me to turn on my apartment lights in the middle of play again. That game was Outlast by Red Barrels. Outlast was much more intense than Amnesia, setting the bar even higher for “psychological horror” games. After Outlast came the big-budget but excellent Alien: Isolation. After Alien, however, I grew a bit weary of the genre. It all started to feel the same. I tried Outlast: Whistleblower, and while it was scary, it was in the same way as the original game. For a while, I forgot about “psychological horror” games, convinced that only a unique masterpiece of the genre could drag me back into this hell.

Fear have layers

Layers of Fear, a game from 2016, was that “unique masterpiece.” It introduced an even more radical idea: “Why just take weapons and ammunition from the player? Remove the monsters from the game as well. Let the player be their own enemy. Let the player become their own, personal horror.” This idea fit the game perfectly. It wasn’t just original; it was brilliantly executed. Such a beautiful symbiosis of an original idea, design, and superb execution reminds me of masterpieces like Alan Parker’s Angel Heart (1987) or Piaget’s Last Fear (2018 novel).

The graphics and game atmosphere were so realistic that I felt as though I were truly there—in the game, in the mad painter’s house. The game design was fantastic, with rooms and scenery changing as you turned around, leaving you with the unsettling question: “Should I continue further?” If you do, and you really should, the story and art of the game unravel further, leading you to one of three possible endings.

They say: “Jump!”

“But if everything is that perfect, as you say,” you might ask, “what’s gone so horribly wrong to make you question the quality of the game?”

Two words: jump scares.

One significant weakness of this game drags it from sky-high excellence to an almost unplayable experience. Senseless and constant jump scares become both annoying and predictable as the game progresses. Using the “cheapest” fear factor in a game with such a superb story, music, visuals, and gameplay is like putting plastic bumpers on a Mercedes-Benz. It simply doesn’t fit together. And it’s a pity because if the developers had reduced the jump scares (or brought them down to the level seen in Outlast), Layers of Fear could stand proud, shoulder to shoulder with the giants of the genre.