Layers of Fear Review

Coming home to his mansion after a court hearing, an unnamed painter is determined to make his magnum opus. We start by exploring the large house, which is rather dark and gloomy. Throughout the house are paper clips scattered about giving some background info. Outside a thunderstorm is roaming. We end up at the workshop where we start painting. After the first layer is added the artist starts to hallucinate, and when you once again walk around the house strange things are happening. Objects move, appear and disappear, strange sounds, doors are being shut. The further into the game we dive, the more the artist’s mental state deteriorates as we learn about his past. When the painter was young he used to paint his wife, a pianist. The two of them had a daughter together, and after the birth the painter decided to focus more on his art than on his family, leaving the wife to foster the youngling.

They then decide to get a dog, which leads our painter to develop alcoholism due to the constant noise created by the family, causing him lots of stress. In order to get some peace and quiet he muzzles the dog, which in turn causes him to be plagued by the sounds of rats (might be a hallucination), and he ends up killing the dog. With his declining mental health his art suffers for it – the paintings he paints are grotesque and disturbing, and his antisocial behavior (paintings) scares away his friends and employers. Being vastly forgotten and neglected by her husband, his lady wife decides to destroy his paintings by having them burned. The painter is especially fond of one painting called The Lady in Black, which is also destroyed. When the painter learns what had happend he beats his wife whilst being drunk and angry, an event that makes the wife leave with their daughter, with no intention of coming back despite her husbands wishes.

The painter later recieves a phone call where he learns that the wife and daughter was in a fire accident. It left the wife disfigured but the daughter was not harmed. Due to the accident the wife and daughter moves home to the painter once more, but his alcoholism still plagues the painter, and he ends up blaming them for distracting him from his work. When the wifes scars are healed and she can move around again she is still neglected by her husband, as he does not find her beautiful anymore due to the scarring. In his drunken rage, the painter yells at his wife which ends with her taking her own life in the bathroom by slitting her wrists.

As we now know the painter has fully lost his mind. We also learn that he might be using his wife in order to make his paintings – he is using her skin as canvas, blood as overlay, a brush made from her hair, her bone marrow as undercoating, her finger for smearing and lastly her eye as a spectator to the madness. The game has three different endings, and one of the endings might indicate that the using of her body for his arts might not be litteral, but metaphorical. To get the different endings you must either avoid a monstrous figure that represends the wife, or be caught by it.

The first ending is the Loop:
The loop is acquired by avoiding and approaching – and reveals that the magnum opus the painter has been woking on was a painting of his wife. When he finally completes the painting it transforms in front of him to a mutilated version of his painting which beginst to taunt him. The artist picks up the painting, and throws it into another room which is completely filled with identical paintings to the one he just threw in, all of them laughing at him. If you are to enter the room where all the paitings are stored we learn that they all are accurate depictions of the wife, he just can’t see it due to his insanity. The ending ends with the painter going back to start a new magnum opus, and the screen fading to black – the loop starts over again

The second ending is Selfish:
Here we must avoid the figure completely to gain this ending. It ends with the painters magnum opus being a portrait of himself. When he is satisfied with the painting he hangs it in the upstairs room, and we get a glimpse of the future where we see the image hanging in a museum amongst other famous images.

The third ending is Family:
To get this ending you must let the figure approach you whenever you encounter it. Here, the magnum opus includes not only himself, but also his wife and daughter. The painter realizes the horrible mistakes he has made, and that he will not get his wife and daughter back. He takes his finished painting back to his room with all the other paintings, puts them all to the torch, and lies down, being burned with all his work.

Layers of Fear is a somewhat unique horror game. It deals with tough topics, such as mental illness and alcoholism. Through visual changes in the environment, we delve deeper and deeper into his madness, whilst we learn the tragic story. It works on the ‘Mad Artist’ trope, the right-brained equivilant to the mad scientist – instead of wanting world domination, the artist wants to create his masterpiece. The game is filled with grotesque imagery, a lot of it playing on painting related items – colors change, paintings change, come to life etc. The game is quite creepy, and the atmosphere it creates is great. The graphics, an important part of a game like this, is great, immersive and interesting – especially when hallucinating.

The music is also very nice and fitting – a classical score, sometimes mixed with grotesqueries, weird sounds etc. to add to the horror vibe. The gameplay is simple, the game is mostly a walking simulator with a bit of puzzling elements thrown in here and there. It works very well in order to tell the story, and you will not feel bored. Layers of Fear is a solid horror game, somewhat unique, and definitely worth a playthrough. It even recieved a rerelease in 2022 all remade in Unreal Engine 5. Pick up either, you will be sure to enjoy it!