I wondered more than once if it wouldn’t have worked better in virtual reality, in fact. This is where Layers of Fear gets ahead of its shortcomings and starts to feel like a fascinating vehicle for imagistic storytelling. Was that passage there a moment ago? That window? Did this piano just move slightly? Wasn’t that door locked the last time I checked? Swivel the camera at certain points and the world mutates seamlessly, tricking your sense of place and direction by making the act of looking itself a form of actuation. It’s like refrigerator poetry, only with hallways and chambers instead of words.Īnd there’s a related twist that involves a novel reification of the observer effect in physics. Layers of Fear lets you think you’re in a residence that conforms to standard Euclidean geometry, then starts shuffling the spaces you wander through, allowing for artful revisitation (and reimagining) of familiar rooms. For most of the experience, the connection points between the rooms aren’t fixed, which has the effect of cleverly unmooring you. And it’s fiddly busywork at that, asking that you align the pointer with activation spots millimeters apart before picking through monotonous debris fields. But there’s nothing to help you sort the wheat from the house’s volumes of static chaff. What’s left is middling backstory excavation, which you get at by dragging a tiny pointer around until you see a hand, signaling you can pull open a cupboard door or slide out a drawer which might harbor a note or other object that triggers an audio vignette. All its conceits-about insanity and what might drive a person mad and what that person might then do-are right at the surface. Layers of Fear harbors no such narrative twists. Games like Gone Home or The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, by contrast, deploy horror genre grammar as a subtler ambient veneer to bait and eventually switch you over to alt-stories as unexpected as they are unsettling.

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