1.5/5 ★ – AaronMurray00's review of Layers of Fear 2.

What the fuck happened here? Layers Of Fear 1 was a game that while admittedly not very original was a fun haunted house walking sim with plenty of decent scares and a cool art style. Bloober Team have evolved a ton since making Layers 1 back in 2016 with games like Observer & Blair Witch adding new mechanics to their walking sim style. With Layers 2, they had an opportunity to really build on the first game and they...really didn't. Okay so the pros: - Game looks pretty for the most part. - The music from Arkadiusz Reikowski is admittedly pretty great at times. - Some cool visuals What really lets the game down most of all is the story. I'm fine with offering stories in games like this that are vague and open to interpretation but much like Outlast 2, the story failed to really grip me emotionally so I just stopped caring and mostly spend time trying to just get through the game and it's tired scares. The game just isn't scary. The first one genuinely had some really clever creepy moments in it but this just had nothing other than random loud noises and the occasional chase sequence...oh god the chase sequences. So in Layers 1, there was no game over. You could die in the game but doing so would only progress you to the next area and trigger a certain ending. For Layers 2, there is an actual game over now with a large monster that will chase you across various rooms in different sequences throughout the game. These could've been genuinely intense but holy shit they were so damn tedious and half of the time I didn't even know how I got a game over in the first place. The monster itself is also just not that interesting. Layers 1 worked because of what you couldn't see so adding a big dumb monster to this just felt like a massive step back. The premise of Layers 2 genuinely had me interested but this was just garbage. Decent visuals and great music isn't worth the £25 I put down on this. I like Bloober Team a lot but this is without a doubt their weakest project. It feels cheap and more like a lazy & vague retread of the first game rather than a true sequel. Such a disappointment.