"Stelllaaaaaaaa!"
- one of the most parodied moments in all theater, yet still more dignified than this
My recent disappointment with Metro 2033 as a Hollywood-envious cinematic adventure light on actual gameplay drew my mind to several years later when "walking simulator" became an unofficial, then semi-official genre unto itself. Layers of Fear was among the earliest titles I remember explicitly described (and not merely insulted) as one and thus thought it a fitting measure of the style's potential. As such, it offers few elements to even analyze. Scant puzzles rely too much on red herrings or an unforeshadowed memory test. Weirdly, the last act, instead of building toward a finale, mires you in the stupidest adventure game trope of pixel-hunting for checkers pieces. You can easily ask yourself:
 |
| A bit on the nose, don't you think? |
- who think the fedora era emoted missives like Facebook addicts, though they do put more effort into some of the more official correspondence. They fare far better on visuals, with many of the individual scenes and props meriting applause.
Scene by scene, if you were to cut the game into ten-second increments, they're even put to solid use. Interactivity may have its drawbacks, but it offers a major advantage over more passive media in making the user inherently complicit to the action. Your every click, after all, can open the door to the next scene, demolish a building, doom or save an NPC. On a small scale, Layers of Fear displays a thorough grasp of this principle. You have no guns to shoot, no spells to cast, cannot even jump. But reading a leaflet, taking a step, even just turning your camera, can warp and disfigure your environment.
Too bad it just doesn't hold up.
Such gimmicks were not new in 2016, but though they'd proven effective (e.g. The Secret World) here they sour through overuse and lack of contrast. I once pointed out that the goofiness of Bloodlines' Malkavian playthrough would grow monotonous had it been predictable and constant, if it did not mingle with the mundane for counterpoint. Layers of Fear proves me right.
For one, the imagery is too random to add up to anything. For another, it makes naive use of some pretty tired tropes. Paintings with bleeding eyes? Seen it. And yes, if there's an elevator in a horror show, of course it has to fall at some point. Jump scares and interface screw work well when the player is distracted
by working on some other task; here, your only task is to keep walking in circles triggering the next jump scare, so there's no
surprise, no tension, no stakes. Similarly, the environments and props
melting into each other would feel disconcerting, if there was anything
they were supposed to be in the first place, but when everything's surreal it does indeed induce what Robert Sheckley coined in Mindswap as Panzaism* - a blase acceptance of the new reality, seeing the fantastic as ordinary in reverse of Quixotism. By your first hour you begin anticipating the changes so reliably that it feels like
clicking through a user license agreement, flipping pages as fast as you can to
reach the "next" button instead of appreciating the content.**
First off, as you might guess, that pretty much kills the traditional boogeyman horror element. Briefly at the start, hints of some demonic, rodential force made it
sound like an adaptation of Pickman's Model (couldn't've turned out
worse than Netflix' maladaptation) but we soon focus entirely on the
protagonist's personal life. So it might still have retained psychological horror, existential dread, guilt and penance and all that jazz, but once again Layers simply lays it on so damn thick as to veer into farce. There was a point, halfway through, when I dared hope it would do for delirium tremens what The Cat Lady did for
for depression, but (and I will be spoiling a bit) it pins its hopes on a far more socially acceptable routine: bashing men.
From the start you know some terrible event happened, and the man has to be guilty so you probably caused it somehow. Of course you're a terrible husband, but it piles on so redundantly as to lose its effect. You're a drunk, you're a workaholic, you stood her up, you made false promises, you argued loudly with her, you bought the wrong housepet, you were late for your kid's birthday, you drew scary children's book illustrations, you no longer found her sexually attractive after her accident, you broke paintbrushes, you bought too many toy dolls, you insulted salesmen, you argued with the dog, you let the kid read the label on your liquor bottle, you forgot to shop for apples, etceteree, etceterah. Even the two brief moments showing the wife lashing out get framed exhaustively and explicitly as being driven to it by the evil, evil man. Honestly, whenever I walked into a bathroom I began expecting to be upbraided at leaving the toilet seat up, having exhausted most other reservoirs of marital vitriol. It quickly becomes obvious that the entire plot of a descent into madness was written around the pretextual need for the male to be wrong in as many ways as possible. Even the obsession with vermin goes nowhere, serving no purpose but to glob on more disgust by association.
I would be curious to test all the critics who gushed praise at Layers of Fear with a gender-swapped version of the same plot and see if they're as willing to overlook its odd feat of redundant incoherence, absent the misandrist conceit. Such repetitive and utterly one-sided characterization might have worked for half, maybe one hour at the outmost, but after four or five laser-focused non-stop hours? Boredom. Just... boredom.
Even if you like the notion of a walking simulator, you must admit there's not much point in one that only works for ten paces at a time.
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* Political commentary not intended... but acknowledged.
** Political commentary... well, yes, again
P.S.: There is one utterly brilliant moment, late in the game, when you walk past an open window and see your only glimpse of the outdoors, night-time, a small patch of greenery walled off between buildings, calm and sane... and the window slams shut in your face, excluding you from nature and sanity. A smidge more counterpoint like that would have done wonders.
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