The stories from Layers of Fear (2016) and Layers of Fear 2 (2019) are combined in Layers of Fear (2023), which remasters the two horror games in Unreal Engine 5 to provide a seamless, perplexing journey into the minds of creatives-gone-mad. Sadly, this remake encapsulates both Bloober Team’s strengths and weaknesses.
This time, you’ll begin as The Writer, a brand-new persona created to write the unsettling stories of The Artist and The Actor while also experiencing your own strange happenings in the Lighthouse you’re hiding out in. You’ll be navigating twisting hallways and attending to a phone that eerily resembles the one in the game’s inspiration, P.T., after winning a contest to write a book about “one of the most mysterious and tragic figures in the history of modern art.”
As soon as you enter The Painter and his family’s opulent home, everything starts to feel familiar. Even the letter from pest control threatening legal action if we contact them again, along with a completely disorganized house, burning candles, and dimly lit lamps in every room, are still present. Built in Unreal Engine 5, Layers of Fear (2023) looks ridiculously good—at the best of times, at least—and the only noticeable difference is in quality.
![](https://www.gamefunplus.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Layers-of-Fear-2023-1-1024x576.webp)
Nothing is what it seems in this game, just like in the original Layers of Fear and even the aforementioned P.T. demo. You’ll enter spaces and emerge somewhere else. You’ll witness the instantaneous transformation of a perfectly ordinary painting into something else. Along hallways, shadows that resemble The Artist’s wife slowly advance. You begin to doubt yourself as a result. What exists in this fictitious hellscape is real, and what isn’t? In order to finally escape these never-ending nightmares, you are forced to face a character’s trauma head-on, as if you were in purgatory.
More visual glitches also appear, and I’m pretty sure they aren’t all intentional. As the game progresses, things become increasingly surreal, with blood dripping from paintings, house fires that disappear almost as quickly as they appear, and doors that dump you in completely different rooms than the ones you came from. I found the silhouettes of papers and other objects that shouldn’t have been there by shining my light into certain corners. The walls would frequently flicker as you turned a sharp corner, and occasionally, interaction prompts for objects would simply disappear. I once woke up in a room and started to walk toward a distant object when I was suddenly teleported through the walls and into a corridor where I could only move a few meters. This clearly happened on occasion. There was no way out other than going back to the main menu.
The Actor’s story also shows that bugs aren’t always fixed; by this time, my subtitles only worked occasionally, and the ‘Press to Drag’ setting that I had enabled to free my tired hands from the confines of my Xbox controller no longer functioned. There were many times when I wondered if something was broken or if the game was tricking me. Most of the time, it was the latter, but thinking this thought at all after running into problem after problem started to ruin the immersion.
![](https://www.gamefunplus.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Layers-of-Fear-2024-1024x576.webp)
Aside from this, the narrative of The Painter is consistently engaging, especially in the second half. As The Painter’s past is further revealed, things start to feel more hallucinatory, and his opulent home slowly starts to deteriorate. What was once a stunning structure is now just an infrastructure of ash, decay, and some truly horrifying memories. There are many aspects of The Artist’s story to admire, including the storytelling process, the omniscient presence of the injured wife, and their child, who we never really get to know all that well but who allows us to see that things weren’t always peaches and rainbows for them.
The first half of Layers of Fear is incredibly strong, but the second half of the game starts to lose steam. In the end, The Actor’s story let me down; even with The Writer tying the stories together, The Actor’s tale doesn’t feel right. Even when read as a stand-alone story, it doesn’t create the same level of suspense as The Artists’ tale, and the storytelling and writing are much worse.
Perhaps by the time I made it through The Actor, I had lost all patience, but it was tedious to piece together the narrative of this director-gone-mad aboard an omnipotent ship, along with the crew who accompanied them. It’s obtuse and frequently nonsensical, and there are so many horror clichés crammed in that it’s difficult to tell what the Bloober Team was going for with this particular tale.
![](https://www.gamefunplus.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Layers-of-Fear-2025-1024x576.webp)
Having said that, I can respect its ambition. The Actor’s narrative adds a variety of gameplay elements; we can sprint, crawl, climb, and frequently have to outrun a monster that, in this instance, reminds me a lot of The Thing. Whispers and item interactions drip-feed you the story, and the puzzles themselves have some depth. The Artist’s disorientation techniques feel much more overt here, and the illusions you find yourself participating in are just as crazy as they were in the game’s opening act. The story of The Actor will not hold your attention nearly as much as The Artist’s or even The Writer’s, despite all these wonderful additions.
Despite how ambitious The Actor’s story is, it quickly becomes monotonous. The process of trying to figure out what happened to our director on board this ship, which involves flipping through movie reels to find hidden doors, shining a light on mannequins so they can recall the past, and generally trying to solve the mystery, becomes more frustrating than terrifying. The ambition on display can be respected, but it’s possible that Bloober Team went overboard and left us with a jumble of horror allusions and mannequin-related gimmicks to sort through, which ultimately hurt the overall plot of The Actor and the remake as a whole.
With the tale of The Artist, Layers of Fear (2023) gets off to a strong start before becoming bogged down by its own ambition during the tale of The Actor. With so many movie references and hazy storytelling, Bloober Team’s once-meaningful examination of a character’s descent into madness quickly loses its relevance. There’s no denying that Layers of Fear is a well-made remake that brings the original games together, but after such an engaging first half, its second act feels incredibly flat. Layers of Fear (2023) is undoubtedly a major case of whiplash, but it does show Bloober Team’s potential to succeed if it can successfully identify the central themes of the narratives it tells.