If a tree falls in a forest with nobody present, does it make a noise? Does the moon exist when there's no-one to look at it? And is the hallway behind me still an ominous jumble of ornate casements and baleful oil paintings, or has it turned into something else? Layers of Fear makes space for plenty of gristle and gore during its five hour playtime, but the game's greatest weapon is simply the dread of objects misbehaving when left unobserved.
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. 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.
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. 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. 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. 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.
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