Layers Of Fear 2 Plot

A slick psychological horror plagued by poor pacing and infuriating instakills

The atmosphere sticks like a sweet, damp odour. As the door swings shut behind you - instantly snuffing out the meagre light - something shifts in the darkness. You're just hearing things, you admonish yourself - it's only the drip of a pipe or the creak of a floorboard; you're on edge and have been for ages - but then it happens again and this time, there's no mistake. The silence is a knowing silence, now; a watchful one. Something knows you're there, and it's waiting for you to move first.

Layers of Fear 2 review

Layers of Fear 2 doesn't have many scares to offer, but visual panache. Examples or ruining the process of putting together this story yourself. While the original game focused on a struggling painter in an opulent Victorian mansion, Layers of Fear 2 shifts art forms to tell the story of a.

• Developer: Bloober Team
• Publisher: Gun Media
• Platform played: PC
• Availability: Out now on PC, PS4 and Xbox One

Layers of Fear 2 is never better than when it ramps up this cloying, almost paralysing atmosphere, leading you through claustrophobic corridors and dank, damp interiors where once fine furnishings lie in sodden, mouldering heaps. Jump jack flash. While first-class tables have been set for dinner, decanters left to breathe and napkins fanned in anticipation, the dining hall is empty - everywhere across the Icarus Transatlantic is empty. The further you explore, the more you'll notice its once majestic suites are now crumbling and decaying, leaving you with just scraps of notes and musty memories to piece together the unsettling puzzle of double-u-tee-eff happened here.

These opening hours are my favourite. The disquieting - and deliberate - similarities to Titanic are strongest there, and the low-key sleight-of-hand horror at its most effective. Later, when the game pulls you elsewhere and even the jumpiest of players - a group in which I include myself - will become oh-so-acclimatised to the scripted scares, you'll feel the weight of repetition and the poor pacing pull fretfully at the edges of your enjoyment. Here, though, in the beginning, your desire to know more will trump your hesitation, tempting you onwards through the reinforced steel archways. You jump as the room trills with the metallic thump of the door swinging shut behind you, panicking as you realise the room has quietly shifted when you looked away, doors dissolving into thin air, trapping you in a dark, tight space with no obvious means of escape. Layers of Fears 2 hasn't taught you to be cynical just yet.

Developer Bloober Team has taken the spectacular spooks from its original haunted house tale and reframed them in this mysterious ocean liner. Here you play a Hollywood actor who's following a curious casting call - but you're nameless and voiceless in that special way that makes it nigh on impossible for the player to forge any meaningful connection. With no internal monologue or external exclamations, it's impossible to ascertain what they're feeling, which irrevocably damages Layers of Fear 2's intensely emotional story; if my character doesn't care about this deeply personal story, why should I?

The problem is Layers of Fear 2 recycles many of the same devices of its predecessor, but the extended playtime - double the four/five hours of the original title - is too long. Its initial unpredictability becomes the antonym of what it sets out to achieve, and an over-reliance on horror tropes and jump-scares pokes holes in the tension crafted by the game's superb environmental storytelling. You'll learn to read the jump scares before they arrive - oh look, there's a spooky mannequin, I bet it'll move just as the light splutters out - and while there's no denying Layers of Fear 2's capacity to pull them off from time to time, the cheap instakills, unbalanced pacing, and unnecessarily long run-time whittle away all the good points.

The frequent film motifs are overused and ineffective. The shifts from full-colour to black-and-white start off impressive, but - like so many aspects of this game - it loses its potency each time it's used. And while their solutions are rarely 'difficult', most of Layers of Fear 2's puzzles lack effective signposting, so even a veteran puzzler may struggle to decipher them.

Tripping over itself to share horror pastiche and homages - Psycho, The Shining, Se7en, The Ring, even Amityville's infamous flies - Layers of Fear 2 struggles to establish its own identity, and while Bloober Team cites exploration as one of the game's key pillars, in truth Layers of Fear 2 intentionally hinders your exploration whenever it can, silently locking doors and dissolving exits to prevent you from backtracking. This is likely deliberate - it keeps you moving forward, firmly rooted in the story - but it also prevents you from popping back to visit a corridor you didn't explore or scour for a missing collectable.

The grossest crime, however, is the routine - and routinely unfair - instakills. In response to complaints that its predecessor was little more than a haunted house simulator, Layers of Fear 2 has swung too far the other way with an array of cheap scripted deaths - some utterly unavoidable - extinguishing the immersion to the point of irritation. Your protagonist's baffling lack of urgency coupled with a clumsy control scheme will see you die unnecessarily and repeatedly in maddening chase sequences, succumbing not because you didn't know the way out of the maze, but because your controller wouldn't let you toggle the interaction button quickly enough to slam the door shut. It's unforgivable, really, given it's the only mechanic in the entire game.

I'm reliably informed that there are multiple endings, but despite two full playthroughs, I secured the same one twice, a bizarre, nonsensical conclusion - presumably the 'bad' ending - that didn't exemplify the story in any way, nor helped me understand what had happened to the protag or why. It was utterly illogical in all the wrong ways and perfectly capped off a frustrating experience.

Sometimes, though? Sometimes when you can only spot an exit from a certain angle in the room, or when you enter an empty elevator and turn around to find it's no longer empty, Layers of Fears 2 can be breathtaking for all the right reasons. Stuffed with dozens of screenshot-able moments and highly memorable sequences, this could've been one of the best horror games in years. Sadly, Layers of Fears 2 is too bloated, too repetitive, and too uncertain of itself to stand confidently on its own merits.

Layers of Fear 2 is brilliant, and unfortunately it probably won’t be recognized as such because it defies genre definitions. In 2016, writing about the original, I asked “Can a horror game be successful if it never manages to scare?” and the same question dogs this sequel.

Make no mistake: It’s rarely frightening at all. In fact, when Layers of Fear 2 does fall back on jump scares or clumsy chase sequences, those are its worst moments.So how do you set expectations?It’s tempting at times to segment these games off into their own genre, to try and preempt pigeonholing.

I’ve seen film circles struggle with the same questions of late, throwing around the term “post-horror” when discussing Get Out, Us, Haunting of Hill House, Hereditary, and more. Myself, I wrote that Layers of Fear's follow-up “wasn’t a horror game” when it released in 2017. IDG / Hayden DingmanMy mistake. Problem is, “horror” has always been one of the more one-note game genres, perhaps because the medium came of age during the slasher era and its decades-long death rattle. For a while you shot the monsters, a la Resident Evil and Silent Hill. Then you ran from monsters, a la Penumbra and Amnesia.

A refreshing change, that latter, but still fundamentally more of the same vein of horror.But there’s a rich horror tradition, one where the threats are mostly unseen or unknowable— The Thing, The Shining, The Omen, even In the Mouth of Madness and Jacob’s Ladder. Games can do the same, as evidenced by first, then Layers of Fear and Observer.Which brings us to Layers of Fear 2, a meticulously crafted homage to classic film that uses the visual language of horror to explore artistic creation—and specifically, acting—without uh.being scary. At all.Note, it’s very hard to explain any of this without referencing specific examples or ruining the process of putting together this story yourself.

The usual inclination is to summarize as much as you can, then duck out with a vague value judgment and a promise to the reader. “The story is great, but I can’t tell you why for fear of spoiling it.” I’ve written some version of that sentence countless times, as recently as last week with. IDG / Hayden DingmanI want to talk about Layers of Fear 2 though—at your expense, perhaps.

And so if you want to go in blind (and you should) I recommend rereading the first sentence of this review and then walking away. Layers of Fear 2 is a brilliant work of art. That’s my official stance.Anyway.Layers of Fear told the story of a painter gone mad.

Thus people (naturally) assumed Layers of Fear 2 did the same, but with cinema. And there are certainly parallels, with Tony Todd’s gravel-voiced Director hoping to create his own Great Work.You aren’t playing Tony Todd though. You’re the actor, and the whole premise of Layers of Fear 2 is that you’re one of the early adopters of the Method—which, as you probably know, asks actors to search for emotional truth within themselves in order to embody a role, or “Build the character,” a recurring mantra in Layers of Fear 2. IDG / Hayden DingmanThis manifests similar to madness, with constant flashbacks and disorienting geography, but it’s not.

It’s a tool, a process. Nobody uses the words “The Method” though. Rather, it relies on the audience having certain knowledge of film, film production, and film history in order to connect the dots. Without it, you’d come to a completely different (lesser) understanding of the story being told.Layers of Fear 2 is building towards this moment where you realize it’s all intentional. All the glimmers of recognition, the moments where you thought you noticed a pattern? There is a pattern.It takes time, though. It builds, and at first the constant changes in tone and location seem random.

You start Layers of Fear 2 on an ocean liner, but as with the first game the ship is an impossible Escher space where you exit a room and find yourself back inside, or double back to find a new hallway’s replaced the old. IDG / Hayden DingmanThese parlor tricks continue through the entire game, but they gradually grow more ambitious. A door projected from film onto the wall turns into a real doorway. An elevator opens up onto a city block, skyscrapers stretching into the mists above.

A normal suburban kitchen opens onto woods, with a glimmer of opulence in the distance. The escalation—the increasing detachment from reality—mirrors the actor’s process, as they lose their identity in favor of digging deeper into the character.

Or don’t, as may be.And there are so many references to catch. I started to understand around the time I saw Metropolis, or “Mechanopolis” as it’s called on the in-game poster. Both the iconic factory scene and clock make an appearance, the first time I realized Layers of Fear 2 was borrowing scenes from film history directly. Others follow, from Melies’ Trip to the Moon to The Wizard of Oz, Psycho, Nosferatu, Casablanca, and so on.They offer more than visual flair. The Wizard of Oz sequence, for instance, dovetails with details about the actor’s bleak childhood. As you walk from a sepia-hued kitchen into a facsimile of the Emerald City, the implication is that the actor took refuge in both film and in their own imagination, an escape from their abusive home life. The Trip to the Moon segment adapts the iconic rocket-hitting-the-moon sequence so it also reflects the father’s wartime injury, which left him with only one working eye.

IDG / Hayden DingmanI don’t need to spoil every reference. The point is: There’s intent, here. Layers of Fear 2’s film homages certainly make for unique visuals, and a surreal journey. But more than that, they convey elements of the character’s personality and history by drawing on the audience’s knowledge.That’s sort of the problem. If you don’t have a certain frame of reference it’s all lost—seemingly random changes in tone, in color versus black-and-white, in setting. None of the references are too obscure, to be fair, but they’re certainly not all common touchstones.

The exaggerated shadows of German Expressionism look splendid, but if you don’t understand the parallels between the character’s situation and say, Dr. Caligari or Nosferatu, then there’s a disconnect.Even for those who catch every reference, it’s still something of a challenge to sift through them—especially in the moment, connecting various motifs to the two or three story arcs playing out simultaneously in past and present, and (for the most part) tied to collectible items. Layers of Fear 2 lends itself to multiple replays, catching references or visual tricks you missed the first time when you were distracted more by the mechanics of playing it. Hell, even in the process of writing this review, I’ve had multiple realizations, along the likes of “Oh that’s why such-and-such happened.” IDG / Hayden DingmanSome, I’m not sure I’ll ever know for certain. There’s an extended sequence in the ship’s engine room for instance, and I’m pretty sure some of the machinery was designed to resemble an oversized 35mm camera. Then I worry I’m reading too much into it.Layers of Fear 2 is steeped in enough symbolism that these overreaches seem normal though—even encouraged. Like Observer, Layers of Fear 2 completely commits to a theme—the visuals, the narrative, the audio—and a much grander story is created in the spaces where these elements meet.

Provided, of course, the player’s willing to meet it halfway. Bottom lineSo again: Layers of Fear 2 is brilliant. I think I might be in the minority on that one, and that’s fine. Hell, plenty of people didn’t love In the Mouth of Madness either, especially at the time, but I think it’s one of John Carpenter’s best.The jump scares are a bit overdone, same as the original Layers of Fear, and there’s an abysmal chase sequence in the second act that could’ve been cut completely. Still, Bloober Team’s rapidly proved itself as a master of psychological horror, using symbolism in ways most games don’t even attempt, let alone achieve. So what if it’s not very scary? There’s more important work to be done.