Equal layers at once disturbing, moving and strangely beautiful, Layers of Fear 2 is an amazing feat of narrative storytelling through an offbeat horror lens that has always surprised me. This is a clear improvement over the original; The developer Bloober Team has created one of the most haunting and creative horror games of all time.
By exchanging surrealist art for a classic movie, Layers of Fear 2 puts you in the role of a liner. Like the original, Layers of Fear 2 uses the concept of “mad artist”.
So how do you set expectations?
It is sometimes tempting to segment these games into their own genre, to try to prevent pigeonholing. I have seen movie circles struggling with the same issues lately, evoking the term “post-horror” when discussing Get Out, Us, Haunting Hill House, Hereditary, and more. My mistake. The problem is that “horror” has always been one of the most critical kinds of play, perhaps because the medium has reached maturity in the slasher era and has lasted for years. decades. For a moment, you shot the monsters, both Resident Evil and Silent Hill. Then you fled monsters at Penumbra and Amnesia.
The remarkable quality of Layers of Fear 2 is undoubtedly its expert understanding of a troubling atmosphere. Those who allow themselves to fully immerse themselves in the experience will encounter subtle visuals that will stop you in the tracks and a captivating sound design that will make you jump and look in your room at the whisper you heard near your left ear.
Using headphones is absolutely The Best way to play, because the less intense parts of Layers of Fear are the ones where the atmosphere can really shine. Allow yourself to look beyond the finely explained storyline and the completely empty and emotionless protagonist, and you will realize that the strengths of this game lie in the environmental design, alongside the general feelings of dread and mystery .
The game revolves around five protracted acts, including the three in the middle that you spend mainly in flashback, in a young version of yourself, traveling through dull environments that give your boiler room a rave look of the 90s You slip into steep alleys and decrepit wooden farms, falling on scenes populated by mannequins, objects that trigger a voice-over dialogue between you and your family in trouble, and the occasional hunt for a monster that inexplicably resembles … to a genital tract.
This monster is used to appear from nowhere to both scare you and kill you instantly; A cheap thing that has lost its novelty, ooooh, I would say about halfway to FEAR 14 years ago.
The ambition here is certain, the developer Bloober Team adding new scary techniques in addition to the targeted ghost training of a predecessor. Layers of Fear 2 presents visually evocative moments: the beginning of the game is filled with optical illusions that allow you to see spectral figures in your peripheral vision and environments where subtle switcheros are placed behind your back to disorient you.
These tricks shake your senses, blurring the line between your increasingly paranoid mind and the mental health of the character. I am well aware that there are several purposes, but despite two complete assists, I scored the same goal twice, a bizarre and absurd conclusion – presumably the “bad” end – which does not in any way illustrate the history, neither did I understand what had happened to the protag or why. It was totally illogical in all the bad ways and perfectly crowned a frustrating experience.
At the beginning of the game, you will find a room filled with equipment for artists and throughout history you will be encouraged by rats and by scary portraits, as well as by this fun sequence that involves a kitchen filled with fruits that explode, a particular favorite. take away the first game for myself. But what is really different, and is it an improvement over the first one? The short answer is: absolutely.
Although the mechanisms remain largely the same and the graphics and sound design are still brilliant, I was pleased to see that the suite also contained nauseating and frightening changes to the environment while you’re not watching. . You can enter a seemingly empty corridor, then turn around to discover that the path you have just followed is now blocked by a terrifying man with a rifle.
Alas, yes, the game now has mannequins. Because everyone is afraid of models. Not only models, but also a distorted supernatural spectrum that will pursue you relentlessly, subjecting you to an extremely long and noisy sequence of initiatives that begins to get so frustrating after the sixth time you’ve poked a doorknob.
Verdict
To summarize, it’s far from being a perfect video game. Although he offers a much wider range of riddles and sequences to play than his predecessor, he suffers from being too obscure and too often, resulting in the loss of some of the weight of the story that the most players will probably not forgive.
Those who appreciate total immersion will be pleased to question the situations that assail our protagonist throughout history and to theorize about the heavy symbolism, even after the game has long revealed its end. Layers of Fear 2 is one of the most breathtaking horror games of this generation.