Layers of Fear Review

ign.com:

Not since 2016’s Suicide Squad was followed up by The Suicide Squad in 2021 has there been such a flagrant attempt to make something as needlessly difficult to Google as the new Layers of Fear. This 2023 psychological horror game is neither a sequel nor a total remake of the 2016 original of the same name. Instead it bolts together the first installment, its 2019 follow-up, previously released downloadable content, and a couple of new playable stories to form a Frankenstein’s monster of manipulated hallway horrors freshly reimagined in Unreal Engine 5. Yet while there’s no question that this Layers of Fear is the best-looking and most extensive version of these disturbing stories to date, it’s a package that fails to add up to anything greater than the sum of its parts – and none of those parts are strong enough to provide more than a handful of surface-level scares, let alone layers of them.

Heavily inspired by Hideo Kojima’s masterful and now depressingly unobtainable P.T., Layers of Fear places us into the tortured minds of a series of artists – a painter, an actor, and a writer – and invites us to piece together their tragic backstories by scouring each surreal setting for handwritten notes, truncated newspaper clippings, and other evidence of past trauma they’ve endured – or inflicted. It certainly turns out all the tricks in an effort to unsettle along the way – each tentative step through its haunted houses is accompanied by sudden thunderclaps and distant screams, ominous graffiti scrawled on the walls, flickers of menacing shapes in the shadows, and pieces of furniture dancing around you like it’s disco night at the Evil Dead cabin. There are some genuinely clever perspective tricks employed on occasion – like