Layers of Fear review | VG247
Layers of Worry (2023) brings collectively the tales of Layers of Worry (2016) and Layers of Worry 2 (2019), remastering the 2 horror titles in Unreal Engine 5 to ship a seamless, puzzling journey into the psyche of creatives-gone-mad. Sadly, this remake represents the perfect and worst of Bloober Group.
This time round you’ll begin out as The Author, a brand new character destined to pen the disturbing tales of The Artist and The Actor, whereas encountering your individual uncommon goings-on within the Lighthouse you’re holed up in. After having gained a contest to jot down a ebook about ‘probably the most mysterious and tragic figures within the historical past of contemporary artwork,’ you’ll be exploring winding corridors and tending to a ringing cellphone that’s eerily paying homage to that within the recreation’s inspiration, P.T.
Quickly, you’re whisked into the grandiose dwelling of The Painter and his household, and issues start to look acquainted once more. A house in full disarray, burning candles and dimly lit lamps in every room, even the letter from pest management threatening us with legal professionals if we contact them once more, are nonetheless right here. The one stark distinction is in high quality; inbuilt Unreal Engine 5, Layers of Worry (2023) appears ridiculously good, at the perfect of instances, anyway.
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Very like the unique Layers of Worry, and even the aforementioned P.T. demo, nothing is because it appears right here. You’ll enter rooms to re-emerge someplace totally different. You’ll see a superbly regular portray rework into one thing else in a blink of a watch. Shadows formed like The Artist’s spouse slowly creep throughout corridors. With this, you begin questioning your self. What’s actual and what isn’t on this illusory hellscape? It’s as if you’re in purgatory, being compelled to confront a personality’s trauma head-on within the hopes of lastly escaping these unending nightmares.
As the sport goes on and issues solely turn into extra surreal – blood pouring from work, home fires that vanish virtually as rapidly as they seem, doorways spitting you out in fully totally different rooms than those you got here from – extra visible glitches seem too, and I’m fairly positive they aren’t all intentional. Shining my gentle in sure corners revealed the silhouette of paperwork and different gadgets that shouldn’t have been there. Turning tight corners would usually see the partitions flicker, and generally, prompts to work together with gadgets would simply vanish. On one event, I additionally clearly wound up in an space I wasn’t speculated to be in; after waking up in a room and starting to strategy a distant merchandise, I used to be teleported via the partitions and to a hall that I might transfer not more than a metre in. There was no escape, besides returning to the primary menu.
Bugs aren’t squashed throughout The Actor’s story both; by this level, my subtitles solely labored as and after they wished to, and my ‘Press to Drag’ setting that I had enabled to avoid wasting my sore palms from the shackles of my Xbox controller additionally stopped working. There got here loads of factors the place I questioned whether or not one thing was damaged, or if the sport was enjoying tips with me; normally, it was the latter, however having this thought in anyway after encountering challenge after challenge started to interrupt the immersion.
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This apart, The Painter’s story is frequently fascinating, particularly in its latter half. Issues turn into extra hallucinatory, with the luxurious dwelling of The Painter step by step decaying as his previous is revealed additional; the as soon as stunning dwelling merely turns into an infrastructure of ash, decay, and a few really horrific reminiscences. When dolls and candelabras aren’t spasming all around the present, there’s loads to understand about The Artist’s story; the storytelling itself, the omniscient presence of the injured spouse, and their baby… who we by no means actually do get to know a lot about, however we are able to see that issues weren’t all sunshine and rainbows for them.
Layers of Worry begins out extremely sturdy, however begins to falter within the second half of the sport. In the end, the story of The Actor let me down; even with The Author to intertwine the tales at play, The Actor’s story doesn’t really feel prefer it matches. Even when approached as a standalone story, it doesn’t construct suspension like The Artists’ story does, the storytelling is nowhere close to as efficient, and the writing is far poorer.
Maybe my endurance had run out by the point I waded via the story of The Actor, however piecing collectively the story of this director-gone-mad aboard an all-powerful ship, and the crew that accompanied them, turned a drag. It’s obtuse, and sometimes nonsensical, with so many horror tropes squeezed in that it’s onerous to establish what Bloober Group was attempting to do with this specific story.
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That mentioned, it’s formidable, and I can admire that. The story of The Actor sees varied components added to gameplay; we are able to dash, crawl, climb, and can usually need to outrun a monster that – on this state of affairs – jogs my memory an terrible lot of The Factor. Its story is drip-fed to you by way of whispers and merchandise interactions, and puzzles have some depth to them. The tips employed to disorient gamers really feel rather more refined than that of The Artist, too, and the illusions you end up changing into part of are simply as wild as the primary half of the sport. Even with all these nice additions, nonetheless, The Actor’s story is not going to captivate you half as a lot as The Artist, and even The Author.
As a lot as The Actor’s story is formidable, it in a short time turns into boring. Flicking via film reels to find secret doorways, shining a light-weight on mannequins in order that they’ll retell previous occasions, and usually attempting to work out what occurred to our director on board this ship turns into extra irritating than it does horrifying. The ambition on present could be revered, but it surely’s controversial that Bloober Group received too formidable right here, and left us with a hodgepodge of horror references and mannequin-related gimmicks to wade via at detriment to the precise story of The Actor, and in the end, the entire remake.
Layers of Worry (2023) begins out sturdy with the story of The Artist, and loses itself amidst its personal ambition in the course of the story of The Actor. Bloober Group’s as soon as significant exploration of a personality’s descent into insanity rapidly turns into redundant amidst a sea of movie references and blurred storytelling. Layers of Worry is definitely a cohesive remake that brings the unique video games collectively, and there’s no denying that it appears nice, however its second act feels extremely misplaced when contrasted in opposition to such a powerful begin. Layers of Worry (2023) is one main case of whiplash, that’s for positive, but it surely does showcase Bloober Group’s potential to do good if it may well nail down the focal factors of the tales it tells.
