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.