Layers Of Fear Review

Layers of Fear attempts to bring horror to you from the perspective of a painter. Is the game a stroke of genius, or will the game leave you sleeping in your chair? Check out our Layers Of Fear honest game review here to help you make your choice!

Layers Of Fear Review

Layers of Fear tosses you into your mansion and then says play. While you have no idea what the objective is at first, you quickly find out you need to finish your painting. This is meant to be your best painting yet, so you will need to find all of the right pieces to get it right. Paint and easels right? Wrong. Layers of Fear sends you on a journey through the mind of a psychotic, alcoholic painter as he searches for all his tools. Each piece you find tells a story and reveals more about the sinister painters family and his methods. By the end of the game, around 2-3 hours, you will find out all about his “creative” process.

I can’t really knock it for the story, it works well for this type of game. I can knock it for the scares though. Yes, there will be some jump scares in the game, but they are few and far between. The game doesn’t really deliver on the whole scary thing but it does pull off creepy. You deal with a plethora of fears such as heights, rats and dolls. The dolls and paintings will always be looking at you and various noises will have the hair on the back of neck standing up. The spot that was prime for jump scares was often spoiled by making it far too obvious. You will literally see the person who is going to jump scare you and then you walk up to them and bam, it happens. Not sure why they took this route.

For the most part the lighting in the game is great. The use it to make a room more eerie, or to play tricks on you with the shadows from outside. Sometimes you are even robbed of light just so you will be put on edge for a moment or two. That’s a great use of lighting. A not so great use of lighting is placing tiny checker pieces in pitch black areas that you need to find. You have no flashlight or anything like that so when it is dark, it is dark. Other than the lighting, the sound helps add to the game and creates an immersive experience. It provides music that helps set the tone for the game and sound effects that will get into your head.

I played on PlayStation 4 and for the most part the game performed well, in a technical sense. I had a few framerate issues early on but towards the end it was really starting to stutter – not something I would expect from a game that doesn’t appear to push the PlayStation 4’s limits. When opening doors or in rooms with too many objects the game would slow down quite a bit. The game never crashed or froze entirely but I definitely noticed the frame drops on more than one occasion. Outside of the frame issues I didn’t really run into any glitches or game-breaking bugs.

Overall Layers Of Fear is a creepy game that misses the scary mark. The experience is worth going through if you have the extra cash but don’t expect to be scared out of your mind by it.