We've Been Here Before: Layers Of Fear Two Review (WARNING SPOILERS)

Over and over again until we don't know who we are anymore. In Layers Of Fear Two we come face to face with our inner demons. They come out to play in the most elegant fashion. Demons disguised as love, pain, heartbreak and our struggles to cope with reality. This game brings the player into a mixture of emotions along with the main characters in a play. Whether its through a set character they play or the bone chilling reality of their own skin and subconscious we play the part we were meant to portray, so Lights, camera, action.

Layers of fear two is a psychological horror released May 28th 2019, with, for the first time a dramatic narrator in the game. Who better to dramatize a horror game than the one and only Tony Todd. Tony Todd has that voice that simply resonates and makes you feel what HE wants you to feel. There is a weight, and a demand carried in his voice that creates a sort of do or die aesthetic. Carrying the game to the very end we see Todd grow in the game just as much as the character and the player going to from point A to point realization.

Now like any Layers Of Fear game the controls are the same which is nice because you don't have to get used to a whole new set of controls with a new game. The isn't anything bad to say about the controls. they are simplistic and easy to use which gives the player the freedom to really immerse themselves in the concept and game play without having to drastically adapt to new controls straight away. The environment, much like any layers of fear game changes at any given moment making you feel like you took a heavy drug or have sleep deprivation. This time around layers of fear brings more of a heavy plot line to the structure of the game, which balances nicely i feel with the simplistic controls. The game relies HEAVILY on choice and visual stimulation. When you decide something in the game, its a finite choice you cant go back and correct anything you might "think" you have done wrong.

in this game you are an actor, "who heeds the call of an enigmatic director to take on the lead role in a film shot aboard an ocean liner." Layers of fear 2019

in the game there are also two children whom i thought we could have been playing as Lilly the sister or James the little brother. With this games we actually get names of the characters where as in the first game we did not. There is also allot of symbolism, trinkets even parts of the story that link Layers of fear two to the first game. One link to the first game that really caught my eye was a painting from Layers of fear that was a morbid parody of a painting done by Leonardo De vinci Lady with an Ermine. You enter into a darkly lit room, with that painting right in front of you, with rats all around and voice overhead saying "here we are again" which makes me think that the actor or James has the same delusional mental illness as the painter of the first game.

Rats and fire are two major symbols of first game, the DLC and now this one. In the first game there was a rat infestation in the mansion of the character and now there are rats on the ship. There was a fire that took the home of the painter in the first game and now a fire that caused the ship to sink in the second game. In all the games we have this concept of escaping ones self. So this time around i'm not really surprised that the catalyst chosen to escape the mind was an actor. Playing another part to not be ones self, to escape your own mind, to create a character to cope with your inner demons. this is what we see more heavily in this game than the first. The first layers of fear was alluding to the concept of a deep mental illness that the character suffers from. You make your choices along with the character so is it the characters response in the game that is making him crazy, or is it yours? As players we control the AI we are given, we act it out as if we are the ones experiencing this. So we have to, in turn look at our own demons to really understand that this game or any other for that matter is a mirror into our own mind.

you have three endings you can achieve with this game. good, bad and true. For me, i got the true ending where we are Lilly and we are a famous actress and are playing on stage our dream roles. The "good" ending is the same i believe but with the brother instead of the sister and the "bad" ending is where you are in a catacomb and you come in contact with the woman from the beginning of the game. This "woman" or character in my opinion might be the painting the morbid Lady with an Ermine personified. She tells our character how we have to make choices, we cant just go through the game aka life, and not make choices, so she put us back right at the first chapter telling us to choose which person to shoot. As i recall in my playthrough i said that each choice depicts the playthrough of the game and that the first one will be the most important. I was right. What i am still questioning is how Lilly survived the fire so we could get the true ending? This might be a stretch, but maybe her brother took over as his sister and played roles as a transgender since back in the day there were allot of men in opera who would play as woman, It wouldent be shocking if that were the case. Each note we received was about how to erase oneself and make room for the character, and through the character finally accepting who you are. This is known as method acting, not as psychological, but through method acting you become the character and disregard yourself to an extent to play your role to perfection. My final points on this game are that its the stages we undergo when we are going through deep mental distress that we truly find ourselves and trying to understand a traumatic event that have occurred in our life. We see things in stages and that's why i think this game is done so beautifully, the reels that we collect in the game represent the stages we face in ourselves going from one point of realizing we have a problem, to then actually facing our demon and taking it for what it is. Beautiful, painful, real.