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.
Movies
‘Recluse’ Review – Harrowing Haunted House Horror With Lots Of Skeletons In Its Closet [Tribeca 2026]
A haunted house story is tense, terrifying storytelling when it’s properly executed. There’s been a growing tendency in horror to blend together harrowing haunted house stories with traumatic homecomings. A family member’s illness or death triggers a return to something dark that was intentionally left behind. Recluse hits all the tropes that one expects to find in this type of horror film, yet it manages to push this story in a daring, disturbing new direction that uses sound as a superpower.
It’s a unique lens to experience a familiar story about family secrets, generational trauma, unresolved grief, and the importance of not just legacy, but preservation. It’s a hell of a directorial debut from Henry Chaisson that’s guaranteed to get under the audience’s skin as they’re dragged through this painful, toxic tale.
Recluse is a gothic haunted house story where an isolated audio engineer, Joan (Sasha Frolova), returns to her family’s estate to check in on her father after he suffers a terrible accident. Joan suddenly discovers something much more sinister that paints her family’s tragedies in a very different light. Chaisson’s debut functions as a fascinating companion piece to this year’s undertone, which does a lot of the same things.
These two films make for a fascinating case of parallel thinking that tackles comparable subject matter through a similar lens, albeit in a bigger, less claustrophobic story in Recluse’s case. In fact, it’s the perfect horror film for anyone who was let down by undertone and didn’t feel like it brought enough to the table. It’s a considerably more conventional horror film, but this isn’t meant to denigrate its high quality. Recluse may hit some familiar notes, but it’s a scary, well-crafted haunted house horror story that goes for the jugular.
A gripping mystery that involves the tragic, unresolved circumstances that surround Joan’s mother teases a chilling connection to the recent horrors that have afflicted her father. Joan desperately tries to put these pieces together and give her family some sense of grander peace before she’s pulled under and becomes another victim of this festering curse that’s systematically worked its way through the Wyatt family. By doing so, Recluse digs into some deeper commentary on collective trauma, a very literal look at the “sins of the father” adage, and how one selfish decision can ripple through generations and fracture off into different dilemmas. By the end, Recluse has brilliantly flipped the powerful concept of legacy on its head by illustrating the horrors and sense of entitlement that can be born out of this idea.
A legacy is just another name for a curse under the right context.
”Listen” is a simple but powerful command from Joan’s father that she briefly obsesses over. In a way, it becomes Recluse’s grander mission statement, whether it’s in response to Joan listening to the people in her life, the signals that her body and mind are telling her, or the world’s greater whims. It’s important to reconnect with these grounding pillars, especially when it feels like control is slipping away.
Recluse excels with how audio and soundscapes can create entire universes that are full of rich details that transport individuals to these environments. There’s also a level of objectivity when it comes to audio recordings and the evergreen permanence that they’re able to provide. Joan’s career as an audio engineer makes sense for someone who wants to cling to hard evidence and proof of existence. It provides great insight into Joan without ever getting lost in contrived exposition.
Joan’s entire life is built around audio engineering, and so it makes sense that Recluse features excellent sound design that really goes above and beyond with its production elements. All of the sound design is expertly handled and turns the film into something special. These auditory elements intuitively keep the audience on edge so that they’re more susceptible to the actual scares that eventually strike. The smallest sound effect gets turned into a crushing, cacophonous assault. It’s a really effective way to build terror. Writer/Director Chaisson also handles the film’s music, which achieves a sublime, unnerving dissonance that further heightens the free-floating anxiety.
The story at the center of Recluse is slightly generic in some respects, but the film’s visual language and tone make it feel distinctly memorable. It also doesn’t hurt that the home that Joan returns to is basically an eerie art studio that’s full of contorted paintings. Recluse never struggles to generate mounting dread and terror that pump through every scene. Powerful, thoughtful cinematography consistently reinforces the film’s themes. Joan is constantly reflected in different surfaces or viewed through mirrors. She’s also often confined to tight, constricting framing that all speaks to her refracted identity during this moment of loss and her attempts to regain agency and control by making sense of something that’s seemingly unexplainable.
Recluse is full of truly disturbing visuals that make it seem like Joan is lost in a dream that turns out to be an extended nightmare. It’s a surreal journey reminiscent of invasive psychological horror like Silent Hill, with a touch of Sinister and Hereditary thrown in for good measure. There are so many individual frames that could endlessly fuel urban legends and creepypastas.
It does a great job with how it presents Joan’s fragile state of mind, where chilling flashes of the past sneak up on her and unresolved trauma manifests into unsettling imagery. There are endless shots that are obscured in darkness, or shadow is creeping in from the corners of frames like a suffocating force of nature. It’s very rare that a scene is fully lit. It leads to a very lonely, isolating atmosphere that’s easy to get lost in.
Chaisson’s debut stands out from the many other high-minded haunted house horror films without succumbing to the same pretensions that often drag down these stories. It’s a grief-stricken character study that’s full of upsetting visuals that scratch at something visceral and raw. The horror elements connect, and the answers to its grander mystery provide an appropriate and believable sense of closure. Those who are looking for an atmospheric horror film that isn’t afraid to be different while still channeling something real will appreciate Recluse.
Recluse made its world premiere at Tribeca; release info TBD.
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