Layers of Fear (2016)

Layers of Boredom

Beat with the wife ending. This game was not scary at all. Sure the atmosphere was creepy and I was getting Call of Cthulu vibes, but nothing scary actually manifested. I did not react at all to any jump scares, and I actually missed some of the scenes by looking in the wrong direction since my first thought upon entering a new area was "ok let's get started on searching for treasure", instead of "is there something in this room that might kill me?". I can't really immerse myself in a scary situation if there is no potential for loss. The closest I experienced in this game was falling down from high up, which made it look like I died but did not reset puzzle progress; just a minor inconvenience. Apparently I died from her ghost but that did not cause any setback, in fact it seemed like what needed to happen to advance the game.

I did not like the controls of holding a button then looking in the direction to open doors and drawers. Far too often I ended up looking at the ceiling instead. A simple button press would have been better. I did not like all the tedious searching through dressers and cupboards. The puzzles were not bad but they overused the 3 digit code type. I had trouble with the animal code because the game had just shown a rat and had been going on about rats for the entire game. Despite the paper having a picture of a cat I was absolutely sure the solution had to related to rat, but a walkthrough told me it was whatever the picture was. I had to watch a YouTube video for the phone dialing puzzle because I did not know how to operate such an old style phone. I knew the code just not how to input it. The worst part was the final chapter about looking for board games pieces, which was way too tedious and went on for way too long. Sometimes during that chapter my camera span around in circles for a while and I could not tell if it was deliberate or a bug. The game did impress me with how seamlessly the world could change just by looking around but that was not enough to offset the incredibly boring gameplay. The story was barely interesting enough to keep me playing, and I am not even really sure what happened. I guess the wife made a dark magic pact or something for her success, and then had to pay for it with the husband's sanity? Or her being horribly burned? Or maybe it was just an accident. Then they became distant and eventually hated each other to the point she killed herself. Then he used her corpse as painting supplies to try to resurrect her? Hard to tell how much was real and how much was insanity. The game needed an intro because I had no idea who I was playing as and what the point was until much later in the game.

The game would have been better with much less interactible furniture, more drawing the player towards the spooky stuff, and actual threat to avoid, resources to manage, fail states, gameplay etc. Even if it was just a sanity meter that went up or down depending on the player's actions, with 0 sanity meaning game over.

5.0/10

Thanks, I hate it.

But for real, this is the kind of horror that's all about build up and tension, and then throw a quick scare at you, and the build up and tension. It's a pretty good bit of atmospheric horror, if you're into that. I don't think the scares are cheap, but even if they're done 'well', I don't like jump scares.

I don't know if I particularly want to keep going, I don't play a lot of horror games because horror stuff almost always teeters between 'not frightening' and 'triggers paranoid hallucinations' for me, and there's only some things that hit that sweet spot of 'oh nice, this is creepy and interesting, but not going to make me have to avoid windows for the rest of the night'.

How scary is this game?

I accidentally just dropped a hot coffee down my butt while setting up to play it. I am pretty sure I have burnt myself. Does this game feature any jump-scares as effective as that? If not, I probably won’t bother. You could say I have already shed the layers of fear, which is how I refer to my coffee-soaked clothing.

Also, I need some ice.