The Haunted Hoard: Layers of Fear (Xbox One)

Creating art is a deeply personal process, and by pulling so strongly from the heart in its creation, the plumbing of the emotional depths of your identity can potentially lead to internal turmoil. Art is a medium that makes the creator vulnerable as their ideas are made physical and then the world is asked what it thinks of this piece pulled from the soul of the creator. Perhaps then it’s hardly a surprise that many creators will turn the art back inwards by portraying the creation process in their work, and in Layers of Fear, the developers decided to take a horrific look at the deleterious effects of a slip in inspiration and how the artist and those around them might be caught in a dangerous spiral of suffering as a result.

Layers of Fear is a narrative exploration game, meaning that you are not asked to do too much as the player yourself. It is what many would call a walking simulator, as your interaction with the game is mostly tied to moving about the environment to take in the world the creators have dropped you in. You can interact with objects, mostly by being able to pull open objects not just by clicking on them, but by then pulling the control stick back to mirror the real life action of pulling open a drawer or door. It doesn’t have too many practical functions besides that touch of mimicking reality, but searching around will allow you to find objects that help contribute to the game’s narrative, and there are a few minor puzzles that usually involve identifying just how to behave in a room with a limited range of options. These are essentially genre staples that you must first ask yourself if you buy into, but Layers of Fear isn’t totally oblique like some narrative exploration games, and a lot of its effectiveness comes from creating a world designed to make you consider its plot and truly learn a clear narrative through the places you’re taken and things you uncover. There is a story here, one with a message, characters, and events, you simply view it through an odd perspective, a historical reflection on this dark past with the mental instability of the main character influencing the game world as it progresses and more and more is revealed.

When it begins, Layers of Fear puts you in a very respectable manor where you are free to roam about and interact with your possessions. You learn that the player whose shoes you are in is a well-respected and talented artist, but after marrying a brilliant pianist and having a daughter, his work begins to take a strange turn and his popularity diminishes in kind. Just what happened, how it affected him, and the fallout of it in his family and social life is what you aim to find as you approach an empty easel, and the artist begins to gradually work on a rather macabre piece pulled from the emotional turmoil of his situation. A lot of the story is found in the notes left around for you to read, and while there is a slow build to the larger revelations, the game does not make you wait overly long to begin revealing some aspects of the artist’s decline. Perspectives from multiple characters in this gradually learned narrative are found through these scraps and letters, and while you are likely to have a good idea of the direction the game is going pretty early, it holds on to certain details to motivate you to keep trying to find more pieces to this retrospective story. The anticipation of the form the artist’s painting will eventually take is a major drive to keep you moving forward, and you can also find plenty of detail about an event without the game explicitly confirming what you might suspect. Even when you finally get the release of the details solidifying into solid fact that still doesn’t fully sacrifice the potential for interpretation. This does rely on you trying to find the pieces of the story along the way and a rush to the end could sour this building story, but an attentive but not obsessive eye can piece together enough to still ride the story well enough to its end without losing interest. It’s not a particularly innovative plot or even an incredibly robust one on reflection, but it does tie the experience together well enough and give some meaning to the strange sights you’ll see.

Layers of Fear is a horror game well and truly, with pop scares to startle you and twisted imagery to disturb.  An emphasis is placed more on the surreal and the psychological than the grotesque or monstrous, the world twisting more and more as we plunge into the painter’s psychosis. Things begin fairly mundane in regards to their design and horror, with initial frights being somewhat cheap and not totally tied to the grander narrative. Sure, furniture falling or abruptly flinging itself across the screen will make a player leap in surprise, but it doesn’t much tie into the concepts the game is exploring about creation, loss of inspiration, and the deterioration of social bonds associated with deterioration of mental stability. Objects floating around a room is an impressive visual for a video game but it doesn’t really line up with the plot or characters and seems to just be there to contribute to a baseline of spookiness before the game stops shuffling its feet and embraces its story elements more directly. When things such as gobs of black paint start adorning the manor and rooms begin melting like running paint, Layers of Fear begins developing its identity, and it even allows itself some wiggle room with the pianist’s part in the story and the child’s adding new sources of scares to draw on. The daughter’s scribbles are an excellent way of keeping the art-based horror diverse, and since the focus can be on the character for that section and still make sense narratively, it can bring in objects connected to her childhood for relevant scares instead of doors slamming shut abruptly or other easy horror go-tos. On the whole though, sometimes Layers of Fear relies a bit too much on the generically psychedelic and typically frightening when more creativity could have allowed Layers of Fear to better tie its narrative to the mental decline of the protagonist whose shoes we’re in. The DLC actually does a much better job than the main game of associating the horror with of the add-on character’s life and relationship with art, although your enjoyment of that will likely be tied to if you enjoyed the main game and its direction as well.

While at first Layers of Fear seems like it might just be a tour of a gradually spookier world influenced by its character’s mindset, there are moments where you can actually die if you aren’t careful. The first time it occurred it barely registered to me that it wasn’t something meant to happen, but a few more nailed it in that Layers of Fear does sometimes require a bit of skill and smart moving but not so much to completely pull it into a new genre like adventure or point and click. Outside the notes for understanding the story, the game has collectibles to find as well and multiple endings to flesh out the experience a tad, and it’s not like Layers of Fear is a forward walk to the end. You might have to figure out what the game wants you to do as the design of the mansion shifts into less logical layouts, and the small puzzles break up the moody exploration with little mental challenges so as not to lose the player. Even if if the disquieting mood fails for an individual player, Layers of Fear still has some means to propel them to the end without it being an ineffectual procession through failed scares.

THE VERDICT: For a narrative exploration game that relies on the horror, Layers of Fear succeeds at contextualization for its dark and surreal atmosphere and drives the movement forward with a mysterious underlying plot to uncover through engaging its twisted environments. While sometimes falling back on what might work rather than what might be appropriate to the narrative, Layers of Fear is still able to convey the decline of a suffering artist visually and at a pace that isn’t lost through sharing details. Having to solve the rare puzzle and overcoming illogical geometry mean the navigation isn’t just in service to ferrying you towards the finale, but it doesn’t have enough to really pull in people skeptical of the genre. Layers of Fear is an interesting slice of horror for those who aren’t afraid of a focus on walking and looking around.

And so, I give Layers of Fear for Xbox One…

A GOOD rating. A fine show of narrative exploration being able to shake off some of the problems found in the term walking simulator, horror is an excellent home for the idea of moving about with purpose, and Layers of Fear doesn’t obstruct too much of its plot from coming across in embracing that approach. The story unravels in tandem with the protagonist’s mind, with interesting developments coming with accompanying visuals and sound design. It leans hard on abrupt scares at times, but it packs in imagery that is unusual and off-putting to maintain the horror even when its not thrusting it in your face for a quick burst of fear. The downloadable content really does begin to embrace its visualization of a mind’s tie with art better, but the core experience still mixes in the moments that make you want to push forward to see what’s next.

Layers of Fear gives the player context for the situation, activities that aren’t totally basic, and the imagery needed to sell the horror it tries to execute. The cheap shocks don’t undermine the generally unsettling mood, and the moments of interaction contribute to the game allowing the passivity of exploration but still involving the player in the uncovering of the plot. While certainly no magnum opus, Layers of Fear is a fine piece of art about the pains of art.