Great art, I've always felt, ought to have populist edge. It offers a hook to pull people in, make them want to look and discover more for themselves. On the surface, this is a simplistic horror game with a claustrophobic atmosphere and plenty of creepy moments.
2.5Beautiful boringTeam Blooper's Layers of Fear doesn't exactly invoke what the name suggests. There are no layers, instead the fear that I was hit with throughout the admittedly interesting but underwhelming 3 hour story, is the fear of whether or not...
The demise of the Silent Hills project is still a sore point for fans of the franchise, particularly for those who played the PT demo. Hideo Kojima and Guillermo Del Toro had big plans for the beloved but notoriously diminished IP, until relationships...
Happy Little Trees Every now and then I go back and watch reruns of Bob Ross painting. While some may find it boring, I find such tranquility in it. Talented hands bring to life pictures of peaceful landscapes, as a stroke of a brush comes to another,...
In its title, Layers of Fear implies an ability to inspire multi-faceted terror. Unfortunately, it only succeeds on the surface level: Sometimes I got pretty surprised when something creepy happened (invariably accompanied by a loud noise), but even that layer eroded over time. Despite some creative visual tricks, Layers of Fear doesn’t have sharp enough teeth to maintain its bite.
Artists are fragile beings. A creative block is enough to make everything lose any meaning for them, with the search of the way out of said block becoming the only thing that matters. Thankfully, this isn't the case for most, but the protagonist of...
Though not without merit, Layers of Fear feels like a game that misunderstands its own achievement. The sinister way its spaces metamorphose, their props rearranging themselves whenever you turn around, is plenty unnerving enough on its own; chucking in a bunch of bogeymen and jump-scares from other releases just muddies the waters, and the writing is too leaden to do the story's eventual revelations justice.
I look around the room and notice the doll on the shelf gazing at me with its dead eyes. I turn my back to investigate some items on the other side of the room. When I turn back around, the doll has moved and is joined by another friend. I turn around...