Layers of Fear

Layers of Fear is a psychological horror adventure game developed by Bloober Team and published by Aspyr. It was released on Linux, Microsoft Windows, macOS, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One worldwide in February 2016.

In Layers of Fear, the player controls a psychologically disturbed painter who is trying to complete his magnum opus as he navigates a Victorian mansion revealing secrets about his past. The gameplay, presented in first-person perspective, is story-driven and revolves around puzzle-solving and exploration. Layers of Fear: Inheritance was released on 2 August 2016 as a direct follow up add-on to the first game. This time the player controls the painter's daughter with the downloadable content focusing on her apparent relapse into trauma after returning to her old house.

A definitive port for the Nintendo Switch, entitled Layers of Fear: Legacy, was released on 21 February 2018 and it features, in addition to the Inheritance DLC, Joy-Con, touchscreen, and HD Rumble support. A limited physical retail release for the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4, published by Limited Run Games in North America, would be available starting October 2018. A sequel titled Layers of Fear 2 was announced in October 2018 and was released on May 29, 2019. A second sequel, also titled Layers of Fear, launched on June 15, 2023.

Gameplay
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.

Plot
Set sometime after World War I in the UK, the unnamed protagonist, also known as the Painter, returns home from a court hearing, reading off a letter from his wife, telling him to "Finish it". After briefly exploring his house, he gets a key from his office and opens his Workshop to begin painting his "magnum opus", which brings him on a long and winding loop of corridors that look like his house.

An ambitious young painter, the artist used his pianist wife as a model and muse. Soon his wife became pregnant and she gave birth to their daughter. The Painter bought the family a dog named Popiel, a doberman that the daughter would eventually become attached to. They lived happily for a few years, but some small arguments would bubble up to the surface, such as him spending too much time working on paintings and missing out on important things.

At some point, the Painter's wife gets severely burned in a department store fire. He gets a call about it and instantly rushes to the hospital, upset at how this will affect her, especially due to the fact that the injuries will limit or even fully prevent her from playing music again. He becomes very overprotective about her playing music on the piano or violin, which upsets his wife, who wants to keep trying to get better at playing music.

During this time, his mental illness takes a nosedive and his paintings suffer for it, causing his work to be laughed out of various galleries. His reputation takes a hit as well.

During this time, the Painter and his wife start to have more loud arguments, even to the point that the neighbors write them a strongly worded letter to stop, or they will have to call the police. The wife assumes her husband finds her disgusting and to be a monster, so decides to play the part. This can be interpreted as miscommunication on her part, as the Layers of Fear DLC, Inheritance, implies that the Painter had more of a problem of her attitude, and that she was "empty" of anything that made him distance himself. Nonetheless, they argue more, they grow apart, and the wife even goes so far as to light his most precious painting, "The Lady in Black", which was meant to be a dedication to her, on fire. She also goes as far as to leave vicious reviews of his work on his paintings.

This causes the Painter to avoid his wife even more, and spends extended periods of time in his workshop, not coming out for days at a time. Feeling terribly neglected, the wife eventually commits suicide by using a knife in the bathtub, which the Painter accidentally stumbles upon.

In the years following her death, the Painter's mental state decays further, and he loses custody of his daughter in the process.

In the present day, the artist has fully lost his sanity, and may be using parts of his wife's body in his painting: her skin as the canvas, her blood as the paint, her bone as the undercoat, a brush made from her hair, her finger for the "final touches", and her eye to "bear witness". The character is shown using these items, but considering how often he is implied to have gone through his loops to finish the painting, it's possible that he has used body parts from more than just his wife, although grave robbing has not been confirmed.

Depending on player actions in the game, three endings are possible.

The "Loop" ending reveals that the Painter's magnum opus is a portrait of his wife. He completes the painting at last, only to see it devolve into a mutilated version that taunts him. He takes the painting and throws it into a room filled with identical portraits, which begin to laugh at him. If the room of paintings is entered after the ending completes, the portraits are revealed to be proper representations of his wife, though he is unable to see this. The Painter returns to the studio and begins to work on his next painting on a blank canvas, as the scene fades to black.

In the "Art" ending, the Painter creates a self portrait of himself. Finally satisfied, he hangs it in the room upstairs. The next shot shows his painting on display among other famous works in a museum.

In the "Family" ending, his completed painting includes his daughter as well as his wife. The Painter realizes his mistakes and makes note of the fact that "it won't bring them back". He retreats to the room of his paintings and sets them on fire, along with his newest work, then lies down to burn with them.

The existence of the DLC, Inheritance, and the state of the house tells us that the Loop ending is the canon ending.

Inheritance
The Inheritance downloadable content add-on tells the story of the painter's daughter coming back to her childhood home to face her past. Exploring the destroyed home with a flashlight, she relives her experiences and witnesses the full scope of the tragedy that has swallowed the family.

During the course of these relived memories, there are different outcomes depending on the daughter's actions. These include deliberate choices, such as heading more often towards the mother or father's portrait while exploring, which will lead to remembered dialogue portraying them, respectively, in a more favorable light. Non-deliberate choices involve the daughter having to perform in-game tasks that often affect an interaction with the father. One example involves the daughter creating artwork: the daughter can either create childish drawings with crayons (earning harsh disapproval) or follow the father's suggestions (earning praise if done correctly).

The "Father" ending occurs if most of the memories lead to viewing the Painter favorably. Upon entering her old bedroom, the daughter sees a portrait of her with a flower - her inheritance by her father. She views this portrait as an apology, "expressed in the only language [the artist] ever truly knew". Seeing the father as a tragic figure, who was driven insane and depressed by the memories of the house, she takes the portrait and burns the house down. She leaves accepting the fact that she cannot understand her father, but can forgive him. The portrait is later shown hanging in the daughter's home, while the daughter admires her own child's drawings. However, the scene ends with the daughter criticizing her child's choice in color - mirroring the same statement the Painter made years ago - while the portrait distorts, heavily implying that the daughter is now beginning to experience the same mental health issues and obsession over perfection as her father.

The "Mother" ending occurs if most of the memories lead to viewing the Painter negatively. Upon entering her old bedroom, and seeing the portrait of her, the daughter continues having flashbacks of her father yelling at her. The daughter suggests the Painter's smugness in thinking a painting would resolve her bad childhood. Viewing the portrait as not enough of an apology, the daughter smashes it against a dresser. The action inadvertently knocks over a lit candelabra. Fire engulfs the room, leading the ceiling to collapse both trapping and burying the daughter in the burning house.

The "True Inheritance" ending appears if the daughter collects all of her crayon drawings present throughout the house and is able to rearrange them - with the lights on - to reveal a larger portrait of her. In darkness, a hidden sketch of a large rat reveals a map of the house, showing a marked location the daughter can now find. Realizing her father planted this clue knowing that she would see it, the daughter realizes her true inheritance is seeing the world as her father had. Upon following the map and finding a covered canvas, the daughter remembers being told that "insanity runs in my family", and decides to "let it run". This ending closes on the canvas being unveiled to show the same first layer the artist started with for his story, and the decrepit room appearing bright and intact as it had for the Painter.

Development
Layers of Fear was heavily inspired by P.T., a teaser game for the cancelled video game Silent Hills. 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.

In 2016, Aspyr Media and Daydream released an Android port called Layers of Fear: Solitude. An iOS version was released in 2019 but it was removed shortly afterward for reasons unknown.

Reception
Nick Monroe of The Escapist praised the game. "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". 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." Patricia Hernandez of Kotaku said "Layers of Fear is one of the biggest horror surprises of the year." Danielle Riendeau and Dave Tach of Polygon said "Layers of Fear is like P.T. on drugs." 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." 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.

Choi Rad of IGN found the subject of the game interesting but declared the game "not scary", "lacking tension", and that "every time he started to enjoy the flow, it was broken by small puzzle challenges that just aren't fun to solve." Joe Juba of Game Informer echoed Rad's statements critiquing the game's telegraphed scares, noting that it felt like a haunted house at a carnival rather than P.T., declaring that "After a scary moment, it doesn't allow players enough breathing room, because the next one is always immediately around the corner. Every time you enter a room or a hallway, something happens."

Sequels
In October 2018, developer Bloober Team announced a sequel to Layers of Fear, titled Layers of Fear 2, previously code-named Project Méliès. Layers of Fear 2 was published by Gun Media on May 28, 2019. In September 2021, Bloober Team revealed a trailer for a third Layers of Fear project. The game was originally set for release in 2022, but was delayed to 2023.