Game EXP: Layers of Fear (PC)

I started Layers of Fear, a year and-a-half old first person perspective exploring psychological horror game back in August and I was apparently so frightening upon finishing it and the Inheritance DLC, that I apparently decided to take a month to mentally recover.

Now since it has been 612 days since Layers of Fear was first released, let us jump straight ahead to my approach to the game.

Being a fan of first person exploration games that do no rely on combat like Dear Esther, SOMA, and The Stanley Parable, I feel like Layers of Fear is a perfect fit for what I want in this type of game.  I do not even recall if there was a run option, but I am willing to bet that there was not, so unlike SOMA, and Outlast, there was frequently nothing to run away from, although I do recall having to hide a few times in Inheritance.  Perhaps it was this lack of physical adversaries that allowed the rest of my brain to be freaked out 90% of the time I was playing.  The other 10% was probably spent just being excited that the game was giving me this type of reaction.

Like the painting in the background, the visuals are very painting like. Then horribleness started to happen.

The thing for me that made LoF so frightening, was the smoothness of how the game operated when it wanted to scare you.  One non-spoiler example would be that you would walk down a hall towards a closed door.  You try to open the door but the door is locked.  You turn around to find that there is no longer a hallway behind you but a wall with no door.  Confused, you back up, turn around to the try the locked door again, but the door is no longer there.  You are now in a room with no exits.  Only after looking to your right, do you see a door that wasn't previously there.  You try that door and it opens into a large sitting room.  You pass through the door and as you enter the room, the door slams behind you.  You check out the door and it is indeed locked.  When you turn back around, a painting flies off of the wall and crashes to the ground in front of you, followed by a scream off in the distance.

That's not what a normal doorway should look like right?

What makes the mostly spoiler free scene above work so well, is that there is no indication, with the exception of the door slamming, that the game is doing anything to mess with you.  There is no lag when events happen, and there are often no sound effects to hint that the hallway you just walked down is now just a wall five feet behind you.  It is amazingly seamless.  During the entire game I was hoping that I would be able to see something happening, but the game never allowed this to happen.  You could stare at a wall that you are convinced is going to change into a door, but it will never happen unless you look away.  Or maybe it always was a door, but your brain won't allow a door to mysteriously change from a wall before your eyes because that just doesn't happen.

I feel like if you stripped the Lovecraftian elements away from Eternal Darkness, then you would have something similar to Layers of Fear.

Now, as someone who may frequent our site might have gathered by this point, my laptop is not a robust gaming computer, but it is able to handle a fair amount of games that have been released as recently as last year.  Most of the time, the game ran at around 24+ fps which, despite nearly everything you may read online, is not unplayable.  One of the few times my game acted up was in the beginning when I noticed some tearing and after some tinkering in the in-game settings, which I do not think hampered the visuals of the game, fixed the issue.  The other issues was that the game froze or crashed, but that happened less than five times during nine hours of game play.  And because the game auto saves every time you pass through a door that automatically closes (I think that is when it happens anyway), you do not have to really worry about losing progress.

And speaking of progress, there were only two instances in the whole game where I became lost and was unsure what to do.  Especially in an area where rooms started repeating, I was at first convinced that this is what was supposed to be happening, until I spent too much time re-entering the same room over and over and knew that I was missing something, or expecting something to happen that was not designed to happen.  I was a little annoyed at this wall I was hitting, but that frustration was short lived and I was able to get back to being frightened all over again.

That is really all I want to say about this game.  I had been a long time since I dreaded the anticipation of walking down a long hallway, but I kept playing because I was intrigued by the story that kept unfolding.  I am sure I could have done a speed run, but then you would lose most of what the game has to offer.  At the moment, I am seriously considering picking this up when it is released on the Switch (probably next year), to play it again, but also to show that there is interest in this kind of game for Nintendo's new console.



~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
I Feel the Fear Takes Hold


P.S.  I ended up not taking as many pictures as I was hoping to, knowing that I was going to write about my experience, I was just too frightened to move my hands away from the mouse/keyboard.

P.P.S.  Then there is Observer, which was released back in August.  Here's to hoping that it sees a Switch release too.