Layers of Fear

The player takes control of an artist who has returned to his studio. His initial goal is to complete his masterpiece, and the player's role is to figure out how this task should be accomplished. The challenge comes from puzzles which require the player to search the environment for visual clues. The house appears straightforward at first, but it changes around the player as they explore it in first person. These changes in the environment provide scaffolding for the puzzles and provide regular jump scares common to games of this genre.

The game is divided into six chapters with various items for the player to find in order to complete his work. The game is heavily dimmed, and there are objects that uncover certain aspects of the painter's history. While completing the painting, there is a letter that is slowly pieced together, which shows the origin of his masterpiece, and objects which explain the secret of the painter through dialogue flashbacks.

Set in the 1920s United States, the unnamed protagonist returns home from a court hearing. After briefly exploring his empty house, he goes to his workshop to start working on his "magnum opus". After he adds the first layer, he starts having hallucinations about his past encounters.

The man was an ambitious young painter who used his pianist wife as a model for his painting. Soon his wife became pregnant and she bore a daughter. After she gave birth, he decided to spend more time working on his paintings, leaving his wife to care for their daughter. After buying a dog for his family, he started to have drinking problems due to constant stress and noise outside his workshop. He attached a muzzle to the dog, but was soon plagued by rats, likely a figment of his schizophrenia. The dog may have later been killed by him.

His talent started to slowly decay and his vision for the painting became twisted, and he began to drive away his friends by painting gory and horrific works for simple jobs, including a set of illustrations for Little Red Riding Hood. After a long period of neglect, his wife decided to burn his paintings, including his most cherished work, "The Lady In Black". He had a drunken fit and apparently beat her, driving her to leave with their child. He tried calling her multiple times but failed to reconcile with her. After some time, he got a phone call telling him that she was critically injured in a fire. She ended up horribly disfigured, but their daughter survived.

After the fire, he took his wife, now wheel-chair bound, and daughter back home so he could take care of them. His drinking problems continued due to the constant "distractions" of their presence. After regaining her ability to walk, the wife was neglected even more because her husband thought she lacked "beauty". After he had another drunken outburst, his wife committed suicide by slitting her wrists in the bathroom. In the present day, it is revealed that he went insane and possibly took six body parts of his wife to work on his painting: her skin as the canvas, her blood as the overlay, her bone marrow as the undercoating, a brush made from her hair, her finger for the smearing and her eye as the spectator. The character is shown using these items, but considering the cyclical nature of one of the endings and the general ambiguous nature of what is shown throughout the story, it's possible that this isn't meant to be taken literally.

There are three different endings featured in the game, each depending on the player's actions during the course of the game.

The endless loop ending shows that the artist was working on a portrait of his wife as the masterpiece. He seemingly succeeds in creating the painting, and steps back to admire it only to see the figure of his wife devolve into a mutilated figure that proceeds to taunt him. Horrified, he grabs the painting and hurls it into a room full of identical paintings, all of which begin to laugh. It is revealed that the painter spent years shut in his house working on the same picture multiple times trying to perfect it in a cycle of obsessive mental deterioration. If the player enters the room where the artist threw the painting into, it is revealed that all the portraits are well made and resemble the artist's wife, but he can only see them as a disfigured mess. Returning to the studio, he unveils a blank canvas and begins working on the next painting, further continuing his self-destructive cycle as the screen fades to black.

The family ending is much the same, but this time he puts his child in the painting too. He then realizes the horrible mistakes he has made, and that he can never bring them back, no matter how many times he tries. He goes to the room upstairs and burns all of his previous paintings along with his finished work before laying down and dying in the fire.

The selfish ending ends with a portrait of himself as his final attempt. Being finally satisfied, he decides to hang it in the room upstairs. The next shot goes to his painting on a display at a museum among other famous Victorian artists.

Layers of Fear was heavily inspired by P.T., a teaser game for the cancelled video game, Silent Hills.[4] The plot, in particular the ending with the blank canvas, closely parallels Anthony M. Rud's short story "A Square of Blank Canvas" from the April 1924 issue of Weird Tales. The game uses the Unity game engine.[5]

Reception
Aggregate score Aggregator Score Metacritic PC: 72/100[6] PS4: 74/100[7] XONE: 78/100[8] NS: 80/100[9] Review scores Publication Score Game Informer 5/10[10] GameSpot 7/10[11] GamesRadar+ [12] IGN 5.8/10[13] The Escapist [14]

"★★★★★...A magnum opus...A superb example of making story and atmosphere work together...Layers of Fear achieves its goal of making you scared as a player, instead of just existing as something scary" – Nick Monroe, The Escapist [15]

Matt Ferguson from SYFY Games praised the storytelling calling it "Perfection" and saying the game was, "an evocatively thrilling horror game: it strikes a fantastic balance between narrative, gameplay, atmospheric immersion...★★★★★" [16]

Layers of Fear is one of the biggest horror surprises of the year." - Patricia Hernandez, Kotaku[17]

"Layers of Fear is like P.T. on drugs." - Danielle Riendeau and Dave Tach, Polygon[18]

Matt Thrower from GameSpot rated the game a 7/10 saying, "Stacked up like the rickety tiers of a Gothic building, Layers of Fear proves aptly named."[11]

Leon Hurley praised the game in a GamesRadar review, stating "it’s one of the best horror games I’ve ever played and literally creates a new tool set for interactive scares." He complimented the game's art and the "unease from a horror experience" it provides, giving it a maximum score.[12]

"★★★★★...Bloober Team has created its own masterpiece with Layers of Fear...The game literally oozes emotion." – Lindsay Miller, Digitally Downloaded' [19]

In October 2018, developer Bloober Team announced that a sequel to Layers of Fear, titled Layers of Fear 2 and previously code-named Project Méliès, it was published by Gun Media on May 28, 2019.[20]

• Official website