It’s a tad hard to be rattled by these scenes when you can smell the impending frights from a mile away, or when you’re tugging your hair out from the sheer frustration of an incomprehensible puzzle. Essentially, it just boils down to opening doors, examining items, spotting a ghastly mannequin - rinse and repeat.
#LAYERS OF FEAR 2 SHIP MOVIE#
There’s even a mannequin (yes, it’s always a mannequin) that crawls out of a cackling screen, with black tar spilling onto the pristine carpet, an obvious reference to horror movie The Ring, but also an overused pop culture relic today.Īll these are sights you’ll be privy to as you lumber through the ship, fiddle with various items and artefacts, hoard collectibles in the form of retro movie posters and film photography, and solve trifling but frustrating puzzles. On occasion, pitch-black rats scuttle past the wooden boards of the ship, strangely serving more as an unfamiliar respite than an object of horror.
Falling debris crashes unexpectedly (accompanied by frenetic violin screeches) while hastily scribbled notes detailing the actor’s collapsing mental state are pasted on mirrors and discarded atop piles of books. The game is thick on foreboding atmosphere, with phantom figures materialising and dissipating just as abruptly, and mannequins appearing out of nowhere, but still mostly subsists on recycled tropes.
#LAYERS OF FEAR 2 SHIP FULL#
It’s full of genuinely compelling metaphors that could have been expanded on, potentially moulding tired clichés into memorable, unsettling moments. This encapsulates the biggest issue with the game. Sadly, it relegates the mannequins to arbitrary aspects of spooky set design, doomed to hold ossified, empty postures in the endlessly winding halls of the ship.
Unfortunately, the game doesn’t truly acknowledge this, instead relying on vague allusions to his past and ambiguous quotes that hint at his crippling anxiety. The use of mannequins would have made for a fascinating motif, perhaps with the actor recognising the connection between artist and mannequin to address his inner turmoil. They bury their heads in their hands in distress, lay crumpled in a corner as if having been bludgeoned with a heavy object, or curl up in the fetal position, gripped by some undisclosed fear. Within the actor’s troubled psyche these mannequins-as-family, or mannequins-as-friends, are mostly inanimate and expressionless, but somehow eerily impassioned in their postures. At times, they are muses for fashion designers or photographers. They have been used by artists to study the human form and anatomy since the days of the Renaissance, and still serve as substitutes for models and actors today. After all, mannequins do serve a functional purpose in real life. It tries to put together a nuanced take on this horror trope, often by referencing them as stand-ins for people in the actor’s life, rather than representing abstract fears. To its credit, Layers of Fear 2 seems to understand horror’s over-reliance on mannequins for cheap scares. And under the looming voice of the eccentric and dictatorial director, the entire affair eventually descends into a downward spiral of despair. He soon crumbles beneath the stresses of filming on a ship, a place he definitely has some uncomfortable history with. And from the clues and paraphernalia strewn across the ship, you get the feeling that the actor isn’t particularly keen about being here. Then a menacing voice reverberates through the room, demanding his subservience. Before you start navigating the ship, every act begins with the actor waking up from his bed in his cabin, which is immaculately decorated with tasteful ornaments. This ship serves as a setting for the darkest recesses of the actor’s mind, while the labyrinthine hallways twist and mutate into disquieting, macabre scenes, blurring the lines between fevered dreams, performance and reality.
Like the similarly tormented painter from the original Layers Of Fear, you'll be wandering through a grand but unsettling place, this time a lavish cruise ship. These bizarre figures seemingly trail the main character wherever he goes, a tortured actor seeking inspiration for a prestigious role in his latest film. In the same vein, Layers Of Fear 2 uses such jump-scares abundantly, propping mannequins up in cordoned-off rooms and against dusty furniture.
Like many horror staples, these are strategically placed to unnerve players and elicit a quick scare, with a plethora of games placing them in almost predictable locations: at the end of a corridor, in a dimly lit corner, even right behind the player. The dead-eyed stare sans pupils, the unnaturally rigid poses and angular elbows, and the perverse mimicry of human behaviour hurls them right into the trough of the uncanny valley. There’s something about mannequins that makes them such prime fodder for horror games.
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