It was a dark and stormy night. The floorboards creaked. The rats scurried. And the Paintings seemed to stare. Layers of Fear had a publication strategy: it broadsided us with clichés so evident that they seemed to find their very own freshness, and it combined jumpscares — such a stale staple of these films — with perspective trickery to make us dread such standard video game functions as shifting, opening doors, and turning our minds. But it never got in to them. It was like the match had gone digging through the debris of horror and turned crap into quick treasure. But its thrills ebbed in the memory as fast as the adrenaline from the bloodstream.
Layers of Stress 2 tries another tack. We perform as a tortured artist, just as before, but the art has changed. Rather than paintings, we have films. In terms of the gloomy house, we now have a ship, whose corridors drip and influence. 1 good thing about the sport is that it is almost impossible to spoil; its own storyline is covered in cloudy layers of metaphor — if not very fear — as well as such, if you told anyone what happened in its later minutes it could make as much sense (and be roughly as persuasive ) as if you recounted a dream you’d had. This from the official website:’Players control a Hollywood celebrity who heeds the call of an undercover director to undertake the lead role in a movie shot aboard an ocean lining’ That is about as far as concrete plotting takes you.
All of that will doubtless come as very good news to players of the very first game, who are used to spooning through the narrative soup for specifics. But what of those who have not? They’ll find a point-and-click experience in the modern mould — which is to say, puzzles which are not so much worried about taxing the brain as gritting the storyline with texture. Think of Gone House, which gently cluttered its rooms with hints to its personalities up to to its padlock combinations. Layers of Panic two, setting a faint responsibility to its title, halfheartedly stuffs its tale with horrors. But programmer Bloober Team strays off course and cruises full steam into story, which wasn’t the most powerful aspect of its predecessor, and nor is it here.
The problem for me is that, as I plodded through, I felt my feet sinking into surrealism like quicksand. I would open a door in the floor, fall upward, creep through a pirate cove, end up in a space plush with curtains and a black zig-zag floor, and be chased out by a boogeyman before I had time to nod apologetically in David Lynch. It’s all used in the pursuit of backstory, its unsettling stew of images tied to its own hero and the pains of the past. This was likewise the case last time round, in the first; its characters were clumsily daubed and thin as watercolour, but it had the smarts to put its scares front and center. Here, the writing is about of the same normal, and the voice acting is uneven, but things don’t go bump as they should.
And with Tony Todd — that scared us witless as Candyman – supplying you with sinister directions. I don’t find any reason why they shouldn’t have. It was a relief to hear his voice — which coffee-grinder rumble in the deep — and I felt sure that, under his leadership, we were being guided toward a dire need for fresh underwear. Unfortunately, it wasn’t to be. That which we do get are neglect states. Now and then you’re chased by a lumbering brute that clobbers you directly to a kill display. The problem with neglect states, in terror games like these, is they kill all of the horror; fear turns to stress, and frustration thins to moderate boredom. Really, it’s a pity that Bloober Team felt the need to add these jolts of arbitrary panic when, elsewhere, its own ability shines throughout the shadows.
There are sections of inspired design. A Wizard of Oz passing, at a tumbledown wooden house is positioned in a crosswind with Eraserhead: a hurricane of TV static blows in the window panes and a creature, not as lifeless as it needs to be, twitches about the table. What a trip. These film-coloured dreams dampen the entire game. There and here, an inspired touch leaks out — a coin of white light beaming through a wall by an unseen projector, like our lives were lived in the shadow of the movies.
That certainly appears to be the case for our protagonist. However, what ought to be traumatic and fearful is turned to pop-culture cool and reference-spotting. When I return to the first match, I recall those leering Goyas, with their ghoulish faces and charred shadow. Here, what amuses the walls are mock movie posters — magnificent, stylised pastiches of Metropolis, The Shining, and The Maltese Falcon — that are wonderful medications for a movie junkie like me, however they don’t gnaw in the nerves. We find our patience, maybe not our nerves, frayed by a small scattering of technical trouble — frame rate which, regrettably, jitters more than we do, and a few infuriating pauses as a little loading roundel whirs on a doorknob, as whatever is on the opposite side is conjured up.
By the time the closing credits rolled, I found my head reeling with intriguing pictures and afloat on the match mood. Credit needs to go, naturally, to Bloober Team for placing a different course because of its sequel, freshening the setting and shifting its subject matter to the darkened skin of cinema. It is just a pity that it didn’t bring the chills and scares that littered with the last outing. Length of Fear 2 is crammed with mysterious messages about acting procedure:’You construct one personality. You ruin the other. There is no other way,’ one voice croons early on. But I could not help believing that, in making a new game, you do not need to destroy the other. There’s another manner.
