I adore the original Layers of Fear. While it's a far cry from the more popular survival horror genre and is firmly a narrative psychological horror (what some may negatively describe as a "walking simulator"), it didn't take me long to fall in love with its twisted, visceral world and haunting tale of the weight of trauma, the effects of obsession, and the consequences of addiction, all wrapped in a macabre shell of layered paint and desolation.
Bloober Team may be seen as hit or miss as a horror developer, but I still maintain that Layers of Fear is a special game. Bloober Team decided to reimagine 2016's Layers of Fear in Unreal Engine 5, complete with the existing Inheritance DLC, a new The Final Note DLC, Layers of Fear 2 (the 2019 sequel), and a new The Writer DLC to tie all these spooky stories together. It's an ambitious anthology of art and horror, and it absolutely shines on the latest and greatest gaming hardware and consoles. It's not perfect, though, both because of lackluster new additions and lingering flaws of what already was.
