Sadly, the horrors themselves aren't quite a match for the inventiveness with which they're introduced. Character movement feels unwieldy at first, but this is actually a deft bit of characterisation.
Out of the way please, manky ghost lady - I realise you're starved for company, but I'm just here to check out your collection of Rembrandts, thanks. When you do cotton on that something unpleasant has materialised at your back, there's the urge to retreat passive-aggressively into it, elbowing the entity aside before it has the chance to rattle you.
It's like an entire game's worth of "Don't Blink". You turn a final time and, thank heavens, there's another door.Īt their most effective, Layers of Fear's geometry warping gambits leave you hell-bent on keeping all of the environment in view, all of the time - a mania that had me sidling along skirting boards as though circling a target in a first-person shooter, and tip-toeing backwards down corridors with a paranoid eye resolutely trained on a suspicious prop. You turn again and by Jove, the fireplace is melting. You turn around again and - crikey, there's a stuffed deer's head millimetres from your nose. You trot over to collect or fiddle with it, turn around with your prize and oh, what's this? The door isn't there anymore. Across the room there is something shiny and interactive-looking. A low-key scenario might run as follows: you walk into a room, typically a firelit room full of smashed-up bookcases, worrying stains and paintings derived from the Thousand Yard Stare school of Golden Age Dutch portraiture. We're all used to "it's behind you" moments in horror games, but Layers of Fear's contributions are a cut above, with entire environments shape-shifting the instant they escape your gaze. Among developer Bloober's smarter decisions is to let you explore the house almost in its entirety before getting into the meat of the story later on, you'll catch glimpses of the starting layout and furnishings through the pulsing matrix of your character's insanity. Much as Silent Hill 4 returned to the same boarded-up apartment between levels, so each chapter is a jaunt through a labyrinth of hallucinations which drops you back at your workshop, where the portrait you're completing assumes an increasingly malevolent form. The choice of an artist as protagonist allows for much gleeful poking of the fourth wall, but more importantly, it provides Layers of Fear with an airtight structure.
The game casts players as a reclusive, alcoholic painter, attempting to finish a masterwork in the belly of a rotting mansion while sinking further and further into his delusions. But it falls to horror designers to make a point of such deceptions, and if Layers of Fear is a little too aimless and beholden to cliche to recommend, it did often leave me afraid to look away. This is an anxiety games in general are well-placed to exploit - game design is, after all, as much a question of hiding as revealing, of quietly rolling out new enemies, areas and so forth while the player is distracted by a pretty explosion or, in this case, a copy of Francisco Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son.
#Layers of fear full game mac#
0 kommentar(er)
