2023 is a big year for horror game remakes and remasters. The remake of the original Dead Space managed to improve a game that was already a classic, playing on the expectations of long-time fans and making smart tweaks to the original setting. The new Resident Evil 4 took a game that was already considered by many to be one of the greatest ever, and somehow improved and expanded upon it, bringing it closer to the survival horror aesthetic of the rest of the series while still having a ton of fun. With those two games, the bar for reimagined horror games is set impossibly high.
The original Layers of Fear had its fans, but it doesn’t have nearly the pedigree of Dead Space or Resident Evil. If anything, there was a lot of room for improvement, and a remake of some kind doesn’t sound like the worst idea.
The new Layers of Fear includes a modified version of the original game in a new engine, the original game’s downloadable episode Inheritance, Layers of Fear 2, and a new episode set in the house of the original. Additionally, all of this is explored through a new scenario that works as a framing device for the entire collection.
You begin the game as a new character, the writer, who finds herself in a creepy lighthouse. Before long you learn that her stay here is intentional, part of a contest she won to get both a book deal and the perfect environment to write said book. After a brief intro she gets to typing, and the game flows naturally into the intro of the original Layers of Fear.
This is more or less the progression. You’ll play about half of the first game before popping out for a session with the writer. From there you’ll return to finish the first game, and then repeat the process for Layers of Fear 2. The game presents this as one cohesive experience, with mechanics, controls, and visuals aligned across it all.
Each of these games and the extra episodes were pretty short on their own, ranging from 2-5 hours or so each. Put together though, this new game is a pretty large package, coming out to 12-15 hours for a basic playthrough. It’s undeniably a lot of content for the price.
Whether it will be a fun 12-15 hours is a little more subjective.
I was immediately put off by the initial lighthouse scenario. The writer’s voice performance was hit or miss, and it was a little odd to literally write off the stories of the original games as the fictional works of a brand new character.
Once I got into the remaster of the original game, things started to feel more familiar. I found the original 2016 game to be a pretty breezy horror experience that was hard to get too mad at. You essentially walked down hallways, read notes, and the game tried as hard as it could to scare you. It didn’t overstay its welcome or force cheap stealth and fail states into the mix like so many P.T.-inspired horror games do. It was a somewhat trashy, edgelord horror game, but in a weirdly good way.
It wasn’t until years later that I’d realize (through a very insightful Youtube video) how much Bloober Team generously borrows its ideas from other media. And so it’s hard not to come to this remastered game expecting more from a more mature and established studio.
Sadly, outside of a much needed rethink of the wife character (she is no longer animated exactly like Lisa from P.T., and her outfit is far more modest), the rest of the game is more or less the same. The same public domain paintings are copy/pasted all over the game, attributed to our protagonist, the painter. That odd painting that’s clearly a bad photoshop of the face-melting scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark is still proudly plastered all over the game. I mean, surely Bloober Team employs artists at this point, right? It would have been an easy homerun to replace the public domain art with some truly original artwork.
Ultimately though, this is actually a small quibble compared to some of the larger changes and issues in this game.
On a technical level (at least at the time of review), Layers of Fear is full of glitches and scripting bugs. In a game all about impossible spaces, repeating hallways, and visual tricks, it can suck all the air out of the room when you see new assets pop into view or doors glitch into place at the edges of the screen. Worse were the many times I had to reload my checkpoint due to a script simply not triggering.
My least favorite glitch happened constantly throughout the Layers of Fear 2 chapters. There, my controller would get stuck rumbling pretty regularly. This is a pretty common glitch in a lot of games, but I never had it happen this often or this aggressively. It turns out letting your controller vibrate for minutes at a time while you seek out the next checkpoint feels really bad!
At one point, you return to the lighthouse chapter and a phone is aggressively ringing. This, for me, was the first time I noticed two books on the writer’s table which provided access to the smaller DLC episodes. But, with the phone ringing, I wanted to take care of that. As I went for the phone, the door to the writer’s room (and access to that DLC) shut behind me. From there, a long scripted sequence played out before I could return to the writer’s room. When I got back I grabbed one of the books and played through the first of two DLCs. When I got back to the lighthouse, the game had started up at the beginning of the phone ringing sequence again, and I had to replay it to get back on track.
Making this messy experience worse was that I locked myself out of the second DLC book by accidentally triggering the ending of the game. I was still able to play it from a chapter select menu at the title screen, but it made the whole experience feel less cohesive.
Hopefully some of those issues will be ironed out through patches, but that won’t solve some of the intentional changes introduced to the original games.
There are now several sequences added where the wife or (in Layers of Fear 2) the formless man appears and pursues you. The only way to keep them at bay is to supercharge your lantern or flashlight (Alan Wake-style) and burn them away. They’ll disappear for a few seconds, and then quickly revive and continue pursuing you. At first, this creates some interesting tension, but the amount of time they are halted barely gives you enough time to get out of visual range. It’s easier to keep them nearby and just repeatedly burn them away as you slowly hunt for the next key or door.
This was effective in creating some anxiety, but it was never about being scared of being chased. It was a fear of losing progress while navigating a confusing maze and repeatedly stunning an obnoxious pursuer. The one saving grace of this is that you can actually go into the options and turn it off. The wife or man will still chase you, but as soon as they get close they’ll simply burn away on their own. I endured the intended experience for a while, but by the time I was in Layers of Fear 2 content I’d had my fill and turned on safe mode.
Survival horror games have been around for a while now. There are so many examples of high quality combat, and so few examples of non-combat games that actually work well. In hindsight, I really appreciate that the original Layers of Fear threw away combat and fail-states entirely while remaining engaging and scary. The addition of repetitive pursuits and a lantern/flashlight “weapon” are unforced errors that cheapen the experience.
But it’s the story changes that really put the final nail in the coffin for this remaster, and to get into it, I’ll have to dive into some spoilers.
Spoilers for the original Layers of Fear and the new Final Note DLC episode below!
In order to set up this new framing device and make the story a complete and cohesive experience, the developers have made some questionable changes to the original game. The rat queen, a painting of a woman holding a pet rat, who has unsettling rat features of her own, made its debut in the first Layers of Fear as part of a very brief scripted scare. This painting gets more screen time and becomes more of a demonic force in the second game, but this new compilation works her into all of the stories.
Ultimately, the rat queen painting is a malevolent force that both gives all these artists their talent, and then makes their lives horrible in other ways. While that’s just the illogical conceit for the lighthouse story, the fact that it’s worked into the first game’s story reframes the entire thing and cheapens it in some pretty profound ways.
In the original game, it was pretty safe to interpret it as a painter becoming so obsessed with their work that they ignore and berate their child while failing to address their wife’s suffering. It was basically a heightened, horrific version of an incredibly dysfunctional household, with the husband eventually going crazy and doing violence on his wife’s corpse to complete his work.
Now, instead, it’s all the result of a magical evil force pulling the strings. A story that was originally about a monstrous person is now instead about a monster and some random people who presumably would have been happy without her around.
Even worse, the final DLC addition, in which you play as the wife from the original game, basically amounts to her realizing she’s disabled and therefore worthless. Some of the dialogue in the ending of this episode came off as pretty vile, and I’m not really sure what the writers were thinking.
End of spoilers
Earlier in the review, I suggested that at the very least, this new version of Layers of Fear provides a whole lot of content. But, if I’m being honest, I’m not sure even that is a good reason to check it out. After finishing the game, I went back and played the original Layers of Fear for an hour or so. And despite how derivative that game is, I found it to be scarier, more polished, and flat-out better than the version of the game in this new compilation.
Bloober Team has a questionable history in the horror space, and I find it tough to reconcile because I do think some of their games are actually quite good. Observer is actually a really cool game!
But between their release of The Medium, a poor showing with even more vile storytelling, and this remaster of Layers of Fear that generally makes the original games worse, I am pretty worried. This is the team that has been given the keys to a Silent Hill 2 remake, and at this point they have everything to prove and a lot of evidence that they will mess it up spectacularly.
Red Ring Circus 