Haunted House Exploration: Bloober Team

Haunted House Exploration

Layers of Fear features slow-paced exploration-based gameplay with the occasional puzzle introduced for variety's sake. As is typical for games of this genre, Bloober Team's primary interest isn't in challenging you, but rather to pique your investigative interest with an enticing mystery to solve. Therefore, your interaction with the world is limited to opening doors, picking up and inspecting objects, and looking in the right direction at the right time. Layers of Fear comes with contextual pictograms alerting you when an action may be performed which works well. Therefore, Layers of Fear's control scheme feels immediately familiar.

The ever-changing architecture of Layers of Fear's level design is its biggest selling point. Bloober Team executes it exceptionally well, and progression is often tied to observing the world in a particular way - the marriage between the visuals and the exploration is one made in heaven. And considering there isn't any geography for the player to internalize, pathfinding issues sometimes plaguing the genre is a non-issue in Layers of Fear - everything you might need is in your immediate vicinity. In addition to featuring prominently in the progression of the narrative, Bloober Team also derives most of Layers of Fear's scares from the tentative architecture of the mansion. And while they
As previously mentioned, the tentative architecture of the mansion becomes an integral part of the gameplay itself. Bloober Team comes up with increasingly elaborate ways to twist the player's sense of perspective and geographical bearing. And they should be applauded for how organic and, in the context of the narrative, natural the transitions feel. It's a shame then that Bloober Team relies too heavily on it to manufacture jump scares, to the point where it diminishes some of the marvel it elicited