![]() ![]() Layers of Fear 2 leaves you with nothing but obnoxiously loud noises and flashing imagery and expects you to be scared. This removes any tension from the game and leaves you with horror gaming’s most egregious sin – the jump scare. For the vast majority of the game, if you are not being chased, you are not going to be in any danger. These distinct categories are tangible and left me knowing exactly when I was safe and when I wasn’t. The game roughly follows a pattern of walking walking with spooky stuff happening doing a puzzle getting chased walking, and repeat. Layers of Fear 2 is painfully formulaic to the point you can map the Wiggins out, almost to a tee. However, Layers of Fear 2 falls into a more objectively un-scary category because you can almost see the horror before it appears. Horror is of course subjective – what one person finds pants-wettingly-spooky could fail to phase another. This is a crying shame because the horror isn’t all that great either. It acts more like a set dressing for the horror than anything else. There is a story here, however, it’s neither interesting nor very good. It’s so far in the background, with so little impact, that the only reason I was plodding through the twisted reality that lay before me was because the game told me to – not because of anything particularly compelling. This is amazing considering the game is only 5-or-so hours long. ![]() Layers of Fear 2’s plot takes an age to get going, let alone interesting. After finding an old-fashioned camera – reels and all – the game begins proper, and the “horror” is quick to follow. A few audio snippets in conjunction with some notes scattered around your lodgings give you a basic idea of why you are here, and what it is you are supposed to be doing. You play as an unnamed, mostly unfaced gentleman who has found himself with a spot of amnesia (in more ways than one) and is stuck on an early 1900’s ocean liner. Capitalizing on the success of the original, and the genre that inspired it, Layers of Fear 2 manages to stumble around in the dark like a sleep-deprived toddler before tripping over its own feet and plummeting down the stairs to an early grave. Those tropes got pretty darn old, pretty darn fast and that’s where Layers of Fear 2 comes in. Guns were on the out, and defenseless protagonists facing off against unspeakable, unseeable monstrosities were in. A little over 10-years ago, the horror genre was given a right-good shakeup with the runaway success of Amnesia: The Dark Descent. ![]()
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