Short review - Boring, lackluster gameplay with weak, barely existent horror elements, go play any other horror game, you can thank me later.

The original Layers of Fear was a walking simulator type horror game where players walked along a corridor awaiting scary things to happen, which often failed to provide any reaction at all, with the exception of one scene involving a child which at least got a laugh out of me, while its use of non Euclidean space provided far more entertainment as an experience. A five hour experience that wasn't anything special, an awful horror game that relied too much on tired, samey jumpscares, and a story that felt so railroaded, you'd have to look up a walkthrough to see any other endings. Its DLC story added nothing to the story but features some awful fish eye lens tricks that genuinely ruins the experience, imagine walking around with a camera fully zoomed in and using that to navigate and you get the idea.

Layers of Fear 2 was a significantly better game with a complete change of setting, gameplay changes pushing it away from the walking simulator genre with narrative choices and a monster giving chase, the monster is aggressive often putting you into a fail state that requires a little trial and error to know what to do in that situation, while it still lacked the horror element, it was a far more entertaining experience.

And now moving onto Layers of Fear (Remake) a game that combines both of the previous games together, an additional story, and new gameplay features all wrapped up within the feature set of the Unreal 5 Engine.

And its a disaster in almost every way.

From a technical perspective, the games got serious issues, the famous Unreal Engine 5 "Stutter struggle" is there in all its glory, textures often fade into existence even when cracked up to maximum and the games "Ray Tracing" only appears as reflections and so rarely, you'll forget its even a feature, at least it doesn't impact performance to any major degree. A horror game that stutters takes you right out of the experience, a problem that still exists at the time of this review.

Layers of Fear's Remake introduces you to "The Writer" yet another nameless protagonist to the series, who acts as an overruling hub for the main stories, featuring a square and three rooms to play with, shes a completely pointless character who currently adds nothing to the other two stories and introduces us to the series villain, a character so forgetful that she supposedly existed in the original games, but hey, at least you'll see her fail to jumpscare you over the length of the experience.

So moving onto the first experience, a not at all faithful remake of the first game that takes out a number of scenes including the child scene and fails to replace them with anything exciting but hey, the game has "combat" now. Thats right, your previous walking simulator has some minor combat elements. Which can best be described as Stolen borrowed from Alan Wake, you shine a Lantern at a scary thing with a bright beam and after 3 seconds, the "scary thing" melts into the floor and stays there before coming back for another round. Did i mention the Lantern has a limited life span? That drains while you have it out? So either you drain your lantern fighting a monster, or risk stumbling around long enough for it to recharge, it also has a Hud icon split into sections which means absolutely nothing, causing confusion, it looks like they planned to have a lantern which had to be refuelled but they scrapped it because it would be to difficult to build the game around.

During my playthrough, I did completely different things, but ended up with the exact ending I got in the original game, confirming my suspicions that you basically have to follow a walkthrough to get any ending besides the "bad" ending.

Onto the DLC, and its changed so little, I'm convinced nothings changed.

Theres also a new storyline as the main characters wife, its lackluster and swaps out the lantern with a torch, its entirely forgettable and feels like its there to pad runtime

Moving onto the "remake" of Layers of Fear 2, and its barely been touched with the exception of adding a torch, the hud element returns with less sections and a light on the torch showing the power of the torch, why even have the hud element when it shows the power level on the torch? At least the torch has some additional features like the ability to move mannequins around and of course, stunning the monster, almost, the monster can't move, but it will still trigger a fail state if you get too close, did no one test that? Or did they just not care? Visually it barely looks better than the original, features no reflective surfaces for ray tracing making that feature a waste entirely, still better off playing the original and saving your money.

As soon as Layers of Fear 2's remake is done? Drop to credits, no resolution to the writers story at all, Want a resolution to that story? Onto the "Directors Story" to get it.

The Directors Story feels like it was created by a different studio entirely, one that actually cares about what its crafting, its horror elements actually do something, the Unreal Engine's effects are actually utilised with sparks and lighting effecting the environment and introduces a fetch quest where you have to acquire two items for a movie directorial shoot. And the director minigame is easily my favourite part of the game.

The directorial minigame puts you in the seat of the director allowing you to switch items and characters around to do a scene of a horror film, do you want an ultra violent, grisly tale? Or a slapstick horror film? Or a combo of both since you have five scenes to edit and decide leading to the end of that story. Its short but far more enjoyable than the previous two remakes, it made me want a horror director game in a similar style and something a developer could easily make money from.

And you finally get the end to The Writers story, a small 30 second cutscene and a cut to main menu, that's right, you don't even put the credits at the end of the game, you get the feeling the Directors story was rushed in by a different game studio.

Overall, Layers of Fear remake for horror gamers is barely scary, there's far better horror games that do far more than this mess,