You may ask, “What, exactly, have I stumbled upon?” By contrast, the many artifacts and collectibles that you pick up throughout are frustrating for the way they elaborate upon the game’s horrors instead of deepening them: Watch as art imitates life, they seem to say to you, specifically the fateful choices made by a brother and sister who once stowed away on a ship very much like the one you’re trapped on. Layers of Fear 2 doesn’t explain or justify these sequences, which makes them all the more striking. Still, even when these references and recreations fail to connect to the game’s grand design, they’re at least arrestingly vivid in their aesthetics and often quite unsettling. Indeed, no narrative purpose is served by the awkward mini-game in which you fly, and in hallucinatory fashion, the rocket ship from Georges Méliès’s iconic silent short A Trip to the Moon, or the appearance toward the end by the twins from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. But it’s not long into the game before it starts to feel as if films are being referenced as a matter of course. An early sequence that draws inspiration from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis-its giant brass pipes, its columns of steam-is particularly strong for its function as a filter through which the actor processes whatever horrors he or she is actually seeing in the boiler room. At times, it feels more like you’re watching a scary film from the comfort of your living room than actively participating in one. Even though some effects are logically impossible, such as the way flickering projector beams pierce solid walls, so that the ship’s cabins sometimes seems as if they’re bleeding pinpricks of light, the director’s manipulations are so clever that you convince yourself that it’s all somehow just a practical effect, or a really good perceptual illusion, as with the various doorways that vanish if you so happen to break your line of sight with them.Īs Layers of Fear 2 reaches its conclusion, however, and the protagonist becomes more defined, we become disassociated from what should be the game’s most unnerving effects, like red-gel-lit hallways lined with squirming body parts. The simple puzzles require you to operate slide projectors until you’ve found the perfect shot, to use turntables to position your mannequin co-stars, or to follow chalk-drawn blocking notes across the various dioramic film sets. The game’s first few acts are its finest, particularly for their strong sense of physicality and connection to filmmaking methods and aesthetics. Such visual touchstones and their recurring motifs are the layers of fear of the game’s title, opening themselves up to multiple meanings, like the playing cards that reference Alice in Wonderland but also point to a relative’s gambling addiction. Players set out from an increasingly dilapidated dressing room, exploring not just the ship itself-everything from the coal-lined engine rooms to the kitchens and first-class cabins-but a variety of on-board sets that have been built by the director, such as a pirate ship that’s surrounded by papier-mâché waves, and a recreation of a private screening room. You’ve been hired to star in a film being shot aboard the 1930s-style Icarus Transatlantic, but over the course of the game’s five linear acts, it becomes clear that something else is happening on the curiously empty ship. And from a psychological perspective, this means losing one’s grip on reality, as the line blurs not only between the role the actor has been tasked with playing and the actor’s past, but between a film production’s props and sets and what the actor becomes convinced he or she is seeing: hedge mazes, pirate coves, industrial cityscapes, and so on. From a physical perspective, this means interacting with all sorts of horrific sights aboard a luxury cruise liner’s cabins: the dioramic creations of an enigmatic director (voiced by Tony Todd of Candyman fame), each designed to trigger the actor’s suppressed childhood memories. Bloober Team’s latest, Layers of Fear 2, puts you in the shoes of an actor trying to find his or her character, in both the literal and figurative sense of that phrase.
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