Layers of Fear Reviews
Colouring your world with intense shades of terror.
Layers of Fear wasn't as frightening as I thought it would be based on early impressions, but I was still entertained by its mind-bending haunted house even when the jump-scares fell flat.
In a game that has a lot of fresh ideas on how to build suspense and let your mind do most of the work, it's disappointing to see frequent usage of those tautologies (it's scary because it's scary).
Layers of Fear is a fun ride. If you can live with the poor frame rate you'll find a horror game that relishes the chance to mess with your head.
Layers of Fear delivers on its promise of a unique vision of gothic horror, but the game leans heavily on cliche genre gimmicks to jump scare players.
While Layers of Fear hews close to horror game tradition all too often, it does offer enough innovation to make it a worthwhile experience - especially when played after dark.
Suspense is an important tool, in horror. Suspense is what makes scares work. Five, ten, fifteen minutes of excruciating emptiness makes the eventual jump scare effective because we're lulled into complacency. The pacing in Layers of Fear is numbing, with "scares" coming at you so often they quickly lose their potency.
Overall Layers Of Fear is a creepy game that misses the scary mark. The experience is worth going through if you have the extra cash but don’t expect to be scared out of your mind by it.
Layers of Fear's psychedelic atmosphere manages to mess with your mind for a few hours. But after that, It's all jump-scare after jump-scare.
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Despite the abundance of clichés, you can see that a lot of effort went into setting the right tone and atmosphere. There are some downright mind-blowing scenes and unique uses of audio and color. Great work on that front. Although do try a bit harder next time, because you guys definitely have something going here.
Layers of Fear is a competent demonstration of jump scares compressed tightly into an ever-changing and dark mansion.
Moments like these make Layers of Fear worth playing. Yet as beautifully disorienting as the game can be, it ultimately has little interesting to say about artists and less to say about art. Stomaching the jump scares and heavily recycled horror imagery will earn you a handful of mesmerizing vistas, but Layers of Fear fails to challenge or transform its central trope.
What Layers of Fear lacks in complexity, it more than makes up for with atmosphere. It's a bizarre and thrilling ride that doesn't even considering letting up as you traverse a truly broken mind. The concept is incredibly novel and well portrayed, the wellbeing of your limping vessel never coming into debate as he works on his masterpiece. It's just a shame that, even with all the literary influences, the phenomenal and thought-provoking ambience isn't backed up by the writing or voice work that can both feel flat and uninspired more often than not. The dodgy frame rate that's becoming depressingly synonymous with Unity on PS4 adds to the issues here and pushes it that bit further away from truly hitting the mark P.T seems to dominate, even if it's now starting to pass into gaming mythology.
Layers of Fear is an intriguing experimental haunted house, but without a proper sense of pacing, it fails to scare.
Layers of Fear is an unsettling and occasionally frightening game that succeeds in keeping you on the edge of your seat, though it doesn't deliver up to its potential and ends up feeling a bit lacking.
Layers of Fear almost feels like two different games smashed together to make up a single experience.
Creepy location, poor pacing
Layers of Fear has a great atmosphere, but you may have to overlook a lot of design choices to immerse yourself in what ends up an experience just over three hours long.
Layers of Fear lacks the surprises and subtlety needed to keep things interesting all the way through. It makes a strong first impression, but quickly exhausts its best ideas, making it hard for them to really shine as scary or meaningful moments. It's hard to be terrified when you can see what's coming at the end of every long dark hallway.