Layers of Fear is a great game. One that is genuinely creepy and has a great story to explore. Most of it’s negative quirks are not huge and the positives outweigh it.
The graphics are overall well done. The lighting and shadows are great and the art direction serves the creepy vibe well.
The game is mainly an exploration and puzzle solving game. I still consider it a horror game but by no means a survival horror game. You don’t have to manage your health or ammo and don’t have to worry about dying. The game still managed to put me on edge the further you descend into the protagonist's madness. You are going to want to explore as much as you can as the story is told through items you find such as drawings and mementos which bring flashbacks and memories to you.
The game ran really well although it needs a beefy CPU to be able to do that. On my old FX-9590 I was only getting about 40 FPS but with my Ryzen 2600X I was usually 100-144 FPS with the game on highest settings. The game did have a lot of technical issues though. Many times the game would crash at launch. This would happen on multiple versions of the game, different distros, different kernels and different GPU drivers. I was able to finish the game but every time I went to start the game I had to worry if it would launch. The game never crashed if it did load though.
The game had a decent number of features and options. There is an FOV slider, two AA levels, a toggle for AF, Vsync, two settings for ambient occlusion and 5 other graphics options. There is support for frame rates above 60 so owners of high refresh monitors can put them to use. The game does use an auto save system instead of manual saves. It saves the game after each room you go through but my issue was that it doesn’t tell you that. I found that out on a forum post from the developer. Some sort of indication the game was saving would have been nice. ALT-Tab didn’t work for me.
If you are looking for a horror themed puzzle game such as Conarium then you will probably enjoy this. Blooper Team has really put themselves on the map when it comes to quality exploration/puzzle games that nail their theme such as Layers of Fear with horror or >Observer_ with the Cyberpunk gere. I beat the main game in a little over 3 hours.
My rating: 8.5/10
My system:
AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 18.1.1 | Samsung 850 Evo 250GB | Solus 3 | Kernel 4.17.2-78.current