Reviews
[Review] ‘Layers of Fear 2’ is a Frightening Jolt of Short-Form Horror
Layers of Fear 2 treats its ocean liner setting like a sliding block puzzle.
New hallways emerge out of the shadows. Doors disappear behind your back. A vase falls off a coffee table, then rises back up again. The world around you is chopped and screwed and twisted up. Before long, you begin to feel like a guard unwarily standing next to a patch of tall grass in a stealth game. That cardboard box isn’t getting closer, is it?
Bloober Team’s latest exercise in short-form horror shimmers uneasily before your eyes. The gorgeous textures — oak! brass! barnacles! —invite closer inspection, but the world and the terrors that inhabit it shift and shake like a filmstrip being gobbled by a projector.
That’s fitting, given that Layers of Fear 2 casts you as an actor invited by an auteur director to film a new movie on a lavish cruise ship. But, as the game begins, things don’t seem as comfortable as the premise would suggest. Seawater pours from leaks in the cracked ceiling as the boat rocks uneasily from side to side. But, then just as quickly, the environment around you shifts, and a sumptuously decorated, sparklingly clean hall materializes in its place. It’s as if the promised ocean liner just needed time to put its face on.
While the Polish developers’ last game, cyberpunk walking sim Observer, drew a line in the sand between reality and dreams by casting the player as a cyborg detective exploring NPCs’ subconscious minds by jacking into their cybernetic implants, Layers of Fear 2 never really allows the player to get their bearings. Memories, dreams, hallucinations, reality — they all mingle together in a hypnotic flurry of unsettling images and jump scare molto crescendos.
That motion blur nightmarishness won’t prevent you from sussing out a story — or rather, two parallel stories. As in the first Layers of Fear, most of the narrative information you’ll learn is communicated through pickups scattered throughout the environment. Inspecting items now prompts Gone Home-style lines of dialogue: a smooth-talking Hollywood agent promising success at sea; a brother and sister playing pirates. Layers of Fear 2 uses these moments to contextualize the weirdness around you.
As the game progresses, the plot elements grounding your reason for being on the ship fall away, and are replaced by an intense focus on the brother and sister. Both give surprisingly strong performances — “surprisingly” because I played Observer and experienced Rutger Hauer’s bizarre, off-kilter, not actually good but strangely affecting performance as cybercop Daniel Lazarski and didn’t expect much this time around — and their story deserves the screen time it receives.
That said, you’re here for the spooky mannequins, right? The key art on the game’s Steam page shows the ocean liner borne aloft on an iceberg of these crash test dummies, and they feature prominently in the halls of the ship; pointing guns, hanging from nooses, moving when you’re not looking. But, the real goosebumps come when you see them in action, jerking along haltingly like a stop-motion video of the dead rising, making an eerie percussive noise like their puppet master doubles as a band leader playing a bony xylophone. They are the game’s constantly shifting nature made manifest. That mannequin isn’t getting closer, is it?
But, of course it is. In fact, it may be moving very quickly with intent to kill. That’s right: Layers of Fear 2 has chase scenes! Normally, I’m not a fan of injecting action into a game that should be all about the atmosphere. But, unlike the running bits in this month’s Close to the Sun, the chase scenes in Layers of Fear 2 add to a mounting sense of terror. They aren’t roadblocks, but they’re just challenging enough that you might fail a time or two before you get it right; just enough for your muscles to tense up. And the enemy pursuing you is relentlessly unsettling, like a trio of mannequins melted and fused together into a shifty, flaccid mass.
‘The Shining at Sea’: The ‘Ghost Ship’ We Almost Got
My main critique of Layers of Fear 2 is that sometimes the game shifts too much. I meant it when I said that you never get your bearings. While exploring the cruise ship was, at first, part of the draw, I soon realized that its architecture wasn’t set in stone, but instead constantly changed to accommodate the path the game wanted to take me down. You never get a real sense of the layout of the ship and as a result, there was never any real sense of discovery.
The story is similarly hard to parse. While I got the gist on my initial playthrough, there are still big chunks that I don’t feel I understand (and honestly, reading the Steam summary will give you the important information more quickly and more clearly than the game does). I’ve already started a new game plus, and I’m sure I’ll catch more this time through. But, the story’s delivery being tied to items you find in the environment has drawbacks; you’ll almost certainly miss much of what the game is trying to say.
But, who cares? It’s spooky! Layers of Fear 2 is a brief, electric bolt of terror, a game that begs to be played in the dark and on the biggest screen possible and with a pair of sound-canceling headphones.
It’s just a shame the picture in those sliding blocks never really comes together.
Layers of Fear 2 review code provided by the publisher
Layers of Fear 2 is out May 28 on PS4, Xbox One, and PC.
Reviews
“AHS: Delicate” Review – “Little Gold Man” Mixes Oscar Fever & Baby Fever into the Perfect Product
‘AHS: Delicate’ enters early labor with a fun, frenzied episode that finds the perfect tone and goes for broke as its water breaks.
“I’ll figure it out. Women always do.”
American Horror Story is no stranger to remixing real-life history with ludicrous, heightened Murphy-isms, whether it’s AHS: 1984’s incorporation of Richard Ramirez, AHS: Cult’s use of Valerie Solanas, or AHS: Coven’s prominent role for the Axeman of New Orleans. Accordingly, it’s very much par for the course for AHS: Delicate to riff on other pop culture touchstones and infinitely warp them to its wicked whims. That being said, it takes real guts to do a postmodern feminist version of Rosemary’s Baby and then actually put Mia Farrow – while she’s filming Rosemary’s Baby, no less – into the narrative. This is the type of gonzo bullshit that I want out of American Horror Story! Sharon Tate even shows up for a minute because why the hell not? Make no mistake, this is completely absurd, but the right kind of campy absurdity that’s consistently been in American Horror Story’s wheelhouse since its inception. It’s a wild introduction that sets up an Oscar-centric AHS: Delicate episode for success. “Little Gold Man” is a chaotic episode that’s worth its weight in gold and starts to bring this contentious season home.
It’d be one thing if “Little Gold Man” just featured a brief detour to 1967 so that this season of pregnancy horror could cross off Rosemary’s Baby from its checklist. AHS: Delicate gets more ambitious with its revisionist history and goes so far as to say that Mia Farrow and Anna Victoria Alcott are similarly plagued. “Little Gold Man” intentionally gives Frank Sinatra dialogue that’s basically verbatim from Dex Harding Sr., which indicates that this demonic curse has been ruffling Hollywood’s feathers for the better part of a century. Anna Victoria Alcott’s Oscar-nominated feature film, The Auteur, is evidently no different than Rosemary’s Baby. It’s merely Satanic forces’ latest attempt to cultivate the “perfect product.” “Little Gold Man” even implies that the only reason that Mia Farrow didn’t go on to make waves at the 1969 Academy Awards and ends up with her twisted lot in life is because she couldn’t properly commit to Siobhan’s scheme, unlike Anna.
This is easily one of American Horror Story’s more ridiculous cold opens, but there’s a lot of love for the horror genre and Hollywood that pumps through its veins. If Hollywood needs to be a part of AHS: Delicate’s story then this is actually the perfect connective tissue. On that note, Claire DeJean plays Sharon Tate in “Little Gold Man” and does fine work with the brief scene. However, it would have been a nice, subtle nod of continuity if AHS: Delicate brought back Rachel Roberts who previously portrayed Tate in AHS: Cult. “Little Gold Man” still makes its point and to echo a famous line from Jennifer Lynch’s father’s television masterpiece: “It is happening again.”
“Little Gold Man” is rich in sequences where Anna just rides the waves of success and enjoys her blossoming fame. She feels empowered and begins to finally take control of her life, rather than let it push her around and get under her skin like a gestating fetus. Anna’s success coincides with a colossal exposition dump from Tavi Gevinson’s Cora, a character who’s been absent for so long that we were all seemingly meant to forget that she was ever someone who was supposed to be significant. Cora has apparently been the one pulling many of Anna’s strings all along as she goes Single White Female, rather than Anna having a case of Repulsion. It’s an explanation that oddly works and feeds into the episode’s more general message of dreams becoming nightmares. Cora continuing to stay aligned with Dr. Hill because she has student loans is also somehow, tragically the perfect explanation for her abhorrent behavior. It’s not the most outlandish series of events in an episode that also briefly gives Anna alligator legs and makes Emma Roberts and Kim Kardashian kiss.
“Little Gold Man” often feels like it hits the fast-forward button as it delivers more answers, much in the same vein as last week’s “Ava Hestia.” These episodes are two sides of the same coin and it’s surely no coincidence that they’re both directed by Jennifer Lynch. This season has benefitted from being entirely written by Halley Feiffer – a first for the series – but it’s unfortunate that Lynch couldn’t direct every episode of AHS: Delicate instead of just four out of nine entries. That’s not to say that a version of this season that was unilaterally directed by Lynch would have been without its issues. However, it’s likely that there’d be a better sense of synergy across the season with fewer redundancies. She’s responsible for the best episodes of AHS: Delicate and it’s a disappointment that she won’t be the one who closes the season out in next week’s finale.
To this point, “Little Gold Man” utilizes immaculate pacing that helps this episode breeze by. Anna’s Oscar nomination and the awards ceremony are in the same episode, whereas it feels like “Part 1” of the season would have spaced these events out over four or five episodes. This frenzied tempo works in “Little Gold Man’s” favor as AHS: Delicate speed-runs to its finish instead of getting lost in laborious plotting and unnecessary storytelling. This is how the entire season should have been. Although it’s also worth pointing out that this is by far the shortest episode of American Horror Story to date at only 34 minutes. It’s a shame that the season’s strongest entries have also been the ones with the least amount of content. There could have been a whole other act to “Little Gold Man,” or at the least, a substantially longer cold open that got more out of its Mia Farrow mayhem.
“Little Gold Man” is an American Horror Story episode that does everything right, but is still forced to contend with three-quarters of a subpar season. “Part 2” of AHS: Delicate actually helps the season’s first five episodes shine brighter in retrospect and this will definitely be a season that benefits from one long binge that doesn’t have a six-month break in the middle. Unfortunately, anyone who’s already watched it once will likely not feel compelled to experience these labor pains a second time over. With one episode to go and Anna’s potential demon offspring ready to greet the world, AHS: Delicate is poised to deliver one hell of a finale.
Although, to paraphrase Frank Sinatra, “How do you expect to be a good conclusion if this is what you’re chasing?”
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