Bloober Team is done making psychological horror games
engadget.comLayers of Fear was Bloober Team’s final psychological horror game. The studio didn’t advertise this fact, but behind the scenes, a switch flipped weeks ago: When the remastered and expanded Layers of Fear collection came out on June 15th, it marked the end of a phase that was known internally as Bloober Team 2.0.
“This year is like closing the era of making psychological horror games,” studio co-founder Piotr Babieno told Engadget. “Right now we are going into Bloober Team 3.0, making mass-market horror.”
Bloober is not abandoning horror as a whole, but it is shifting focus. Over the past decade, the studio cemented itself as a powerhouse in the realm of psychological horror games, releasing the Layers of Fear franchise, Observer, Blair Witch and The Medium, all of which generated terror through narrative and environmental cues (otherwise known as “vibes”). Because of these design choices, Bloober games have jokingly been called “walking simulators,” a description that Babieno didn’t deny.
“We focused on the story, we focused on the mood, we focused on the quality of graphics and music, but we didn’t put a lot of attention on the gameplay mechanics,” Babieno said. “It wasn’t our target. But we decided that there was a ceiling that we couldn’t break if we did not deliver something fresh, something new.”
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Going forward, developers at Bloober will rely on action and player input to generate disquiet, and they hope that this nudge in creative direction will drastically expand the
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