This is perhaps my favourite homage to Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon ever In fact, as you play along, you’ll frequently feel like the developers can’t get to the next black-and-white scene fast enough. Whether it’s the area’s lighting being created through the use of projectors, the recurring motif of the lens, with key scenes being viewed through circular or square “holes” that emulate looking through a camera or screen, and the use of props and set designs to create spaces for horror, the entire game comes across as a love letter for vintage cinema. The developers have filled every scene and frame in this game with visual motifs to the unique aesthetics of film. Layers of Fear 2 explores that creation process through the lens of cinema, and visually, it’s utterly stunning. It doesn’t always end well for the artists (or their popular reputations), but when the act of creation requires such complete commitment to emotion and thought, the experience of the artist when making their work can be one that has the taint of the surreal and absurd to it, and the maddening nature of that is a ripe source of material to base a horror tale around.

The Marquis de Sade spent years inside a mental institution, William S Burroughs and his dalliances with drugs were infamous, and in film circles there are eccentrics such as David Lynch behind the lens, and Jared Leto in front of it. The story most people associate with Van Gogh is the incident when he cut off his ear. Indeed, madness and the creative process are often closely linked. The process of artistic creation, in any field, is a sublime one, requiring such a complete focus and commitment that it can begin to distort the way that we view the world. Layers of Fear 2’s seed comes from a similar place, only this time around it’s exploring how cinema is created. The original Layers of Fear explored the intense experience of artistic creation through the eyes of the visual arts – i.e. It’s “terror” that developers struggle with, and pundits struggle to even recognise as horror within video games. The like of Silent Hill would sit within this particular sphere. There have been some impressive efforts as King’s second “horror” category, too. Most horror games belong there – including popular franchises like The Evil Within and Resident Evil. Video games have been particularly effective at the gross-out over the years. It’s when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there’s nothing there…” And the last and worst one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it’s when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. If you think about the implications of what is depicted in Layers of Fear 2, and pay attention to the narrative, this game works as both a beautiful homage to classic cinema, and as a genuine work of horror.Īs the great Stephen King himself once wrote, in exploring the basic foundations for how horror functions (King is actually a superb theorist to go with his novel writing skills): “The three types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it’s when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. But is it scary without that? Yes, it resoundingly is so. Aside from some ill-conceived but blissfully brief moments where an apparition chases you around, there’s no sense of physical danger in the game. In a sense Layers of Fear 2 is one very brave horror game in that it lacks the physical sadism of more base horror films. Related reading: Lindsay’s review of the original Layers of Fear

Layers of fear theory