![]() But on the whole it works, lending the narrative and the character a weight of realism. ![]() Sometimes this breaks into banality with clumsy nonsense suited to a high-school poet. There are hints of it throughout from deranged messages on the walls to a scrawled drawing of a sad face hidden on a child's toy. The shock came from understanding how ordinary most monsters seem on the outside. But there was just a normal man staring back at me. Shortly after, I found a mirror and gazed on my own reflection, expecting to see a monstrous figure or some other scare. Later, a disembodied voice whispered "you deserve this, all of it," and it felt like I did. After a short time I found myself appalled enough by my own avatar to start mouthing questions at it: what did you do? What did you do? ![]() It's down to the player's imagination to colour in the substantial blanks with nightmares of their choice. Many of these show how commonplace your life once was, illustrating how ordinary most monsters must look from the outside. Scraps of text found throughout the house build a fragmentary backstory. ![]() Soon it becomes clear that your past contains ghastly secrets, alcoholism and insanity being two of the more palatable ones. "You realise that there is one active monster in the game, and it's the one behind the keyboard." It creates a unique and disturbing environment to explore. The visual style has clear nods to surrealist painters such as Bacon and Goya. Walls bear distorted versions of classical masterpieces. There is paint daubed liberally over the environment, smears of jarring colours running over the furniture and floors. The time period is perhaps purposefully unclear, but seems to be mid-20th century. Beyond that you must wander the sizeable halls in first-person view, working out for yourself what to do and how to do it. Your only instruction at the start is to "finish it". You play as a painter, who has returned to their house and studio to complete their masterwork. If you want to face your fears, of you want the painter to face his fear, this presence, it depends on you," Zięba said.What every good horror yarn needs is a unique spin, and Layers of Fear delivers that, quite literally, through artistry. "The good question is if you want to face your fears. Just as in real life, the choice itself can be more frightening than the fallout. How can a game actually scare you if you can choose, at any time, to take the safe path and avoid all its terrors? Bloober Team's answer is smooth and practiced: the idea of that choice, and where your brave or cowardly choices will lead you, is enough to push people forward. It's easily the most intriguing use of choice that horror gaming has seen in a long while, as it goes out of its way to give you total control where convention dictates you have none. "You never know dying is a bad or good choice. But regardless of my foolish choices, said Zięba, it wasn't their intention to judge my lack of self-preservation. Ultimately, I died at least once more during that playthrough, and many more times when I played the game in full on my own - often running straight into the ghost's twitchy arms just to see what would happen.
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