Layers of Fear Review (Xbox Series X|S)

In the wake of Hideo Kojima's PS4-exclusive 'P.T' demo, Polish developer Bloober Team unleashed its take on a similar concept with 2016's Layers of Fear. At the time, we quite enjoyed our experience with Bloober's slender adventure - its focused nature prevented the concept from getting stale over a roughly four-hour runtime. However, the game's return in this 2023 remake-of-sorts doesn't hit the same as it did back then, and even though the included sequel holds up better, this still feels like a pointless remake of a series best left in the last generation.

For those unaware of P.T or this style of game in general, you're basically making your way through increasingly weird and trippy environments from a first-person perspective - with those environments warping and bending to represent someone losing their mind. You'll often move the camera in the same direction a couple of times and see completely different scenes as the game shifts and tries to play with your perspective. Most of the mechanics here revolve around exploration and light puzzle solving as you're tasked with finding your way and progressing the storyline.

Naturally, we started out 2023's Layers of Fear by playing through the first game; which is the way the remake's 'story' mode lays things out. On first loading it up you'll notice just how gorgeous this new Unreal Engine 5 version of the game is, and it's certainly a glow-up for the original game in particular. We actually opted to play through all of this version in 'Quality' mode at 30FPS — the game does contain a performance mode on Xbox Series X — but the game looks superb with all of its ray tracing features enabled and we didn't find the frame rate much of an issue due to the game's slow-paced nature.

Once the new visuals had finished wowing us and we settled back into the series' purposefully uneven rhythm, we quickly realised how much of a one trick pony the first Layers of Fear is. Don't get us wrong, this is a psychedelic horror trip probably worth taking if you've never experienced it before, but it just doesn't work very well on a second playthrough. Most of the experience is opening doors, preparing yourself for jump scares and finding the right way to progress, and it's all a bit repetitive if you've played it before. There's a chance its gimmick might not hold up even for first-time players in 2023 either, but all we know is we felt the fatigue pretty quickly on our second runthrough of LoF - even when our first playthrough came more than six years ago.

Once your four-or-so hours of the first game are done though, the story mode rolls right into Layers of Fear 2. Yep, this confusingly-named 2023 remake contains both main Layers of Fear titles and some DLC extras, with Bloober Team running the two main games back-to-back to form the core campaign of this remake. And actually, Layers of Fear 2 holds up a lot better in our opinion.

This LoF2 run marked another second playthrough for us as well, having played number two back in 2019, but in general the sequel just has a few more tricks up its sleeve to make it a much more enjoyable experience to replay. Layers of Fear 2 introduces more puzzle elements, some chase scenes, and more intricate level design that make for what feels like a less linear affair, even if both games are fairly narrow in scope. The first game follows a mad painter's descent into madness, while number two switches out the canvas board for the big screen and a filmic theme - and is just more of an interesting adventure overall.

Both remakes introduce a new 'light' mechanic — adding more of an actual gameplay element to the series beyond walking and opening doors — that wasn't available in the originals. The first game has you occasionally extinguishing foes with a lantern, Alan Wake style, while the sequel mixes in segments where you have a 'film reel' flashlight used to make mannequins move and form movie scenes. Again, the latter feels like it fits the series more - Layers of Fear has never been about actually fighting enemies and we found the film reel flashlight a pretty unique spin on horror's love of messing with light and dark.

Another addition in this new version of the Layers of Fear series is a brand-new interstitial storyline that crops up in-between main game chapters, supposedly stitching the whole story together. To be quite frank we hardly understood the story of Layers of Fear in the first place - this is a game more about weird & abstract scenes and jump scares more than anything else, so it's probably best not to expect a particularly coherent story here. Oh, and the new story-stitching segments don't help with that at all, really.

You can hop into whichever game or DLC add-on you'd like through the game's 'Chapters' menu as a bonus feature, although you'll need to play through the story first anyway to access later chapters on a whim. We stuck to the story mode for this remake playthrough though, with the credits rolling right after Layers of Fear 2 wrapped up.