Gaming What was the last videogame you beat?

Yessss do that eventually.

 

Layers of Fear (2016)

Layers of Fear was, as memory serves, the first time I’d heard of Bloober Team, the developers who’ve gone on to have a pretty big success with the latest Blair Witch game and it was a game that I saw critics going pretty crazy (poor choice of words) over back when it came out, so I decided to go with it as my October horror game this year. You play an unnamed painter who returns home to a dark and empty house; you return to your studio and set out to finish your magnum opus. Then you wander the halls of this shifting mansion, slowly gathering your materials and uncovering the dark story behind this painting. Oh, and you’re also totally losing your ****. You know, having hallucinations and passing out and all that stuff.

I wasn’t expecting anything super revolutionary. Just a good-looking and atmospheric walking simulator with some good jump scares, some good creepy moments and a decent story hopefully. Well, I didn’t get that. What I got was one of the most frustrating gaming experiences I’ve had in a while. I’ll just be up front. I didn’t care for this game. It had a tremendous amount of potential and some pretty good elements, but it has some serious flaws.

I don’t like to be the guy who’s supposed to be talking about one game, but ends up talking about others, but I do want to briefly discuss two other games because they point up just how badly Layers of Fear fails at its most basic level. The first I want to bring up is P.T. I mean, this game was obviously heavily influenced by P.T. Like in that game, you spend this game basically going through hallways and opening doors. There are even a few looping sequences here where you go through the same room over and over, just like in PT. Well, look, I’m not going to attack a game purely for borrowing from PT. But the first major failing of this game is that it just isn’t scary. PT is one of the scariest video games of all time. This one is one of the least scary “horror” games I’ve ever played. It is absolutely relentless in its use of jump scares. I would venture to say there are, I don’t know exactly, but maybe twenty-five or thirty jump scares in a game that only runs about four hours, I’d say. I think I jumped once. Most of the time I didn’t react at all. Like not even a heart jump, you know. And when the “ghost” eventually shows up, it’s given to standing at the end of long halls much like Lisa in PT. But do you remember that first time you come around the corner and Lisa’s just standing there in the entryway totally still? Yes, you do. Because you **** yourself. In this game, it just doesn’t land. I wish I knew exactly why. But there’s just something missing here.



What isn’t missing from PT is that death animation? Does the above look familiar to you at all? I want to stress the above is NOT a gif of Lisa’s attack from PT, it is the ghost attack from Layers of Fear. I think the ghost in layers of a fear has a lacier collar. That may be the only difference.

But what is also missing? The atmosphere. So it’s not that scary, you say. Does the mansion you’re exploring at least have a creepy, unsettling atmosphere. Um, no. No. It doesn’t. Not at all. Second game that I want to bring up here is Gone Home, which, by the way, isn’t even a horror game. And yet the house you’re exploring in Gone Home has so much more atmosphere and Gone Home is, end of the day, a way creepier game than this one. And Gone Home, again, just to underline it, IS NOT A HORROR GAME. But the lighting and the sound design and the storm and the quiet and everything just combine to make Gone Home a really creepy experience. This game traffics in those same aesthetics: flickering lights at the end of hallways, dead silent sequences, thunder effects, etc. But it just doesn’t work. Also, you get the story here, which is a tragic one, basically the same way you do in Gone Home: reading documents, picking up items, hearing short sound bites. And yet I was never invested in the story of Layers of Fear. I never felt anything for any of the characters. Contrast this with Gone Home which was a game where I was DEEPLY invested in the characters. Why does the mechanic not work here? I’m not entirely sure. I will say that the main character’s voice actor is not good here.

This game though just feels very aimless. The game has a very clear chapter structure. You start the main portion of the game in your studio and you leave to go wander the house for a bit. You find an object and the game puts you back in your studio where you use the object to add to the painting you’re working on. You then leave the studio to start the next chapter. Every chapter follows this format and I actually really like the basic premise of ending up back in the studio and progressing the painting at the end of each chapter. I like that. But you never know what you’re looking for in each chapter. You just leave the studio and the game takes you on a basically linear path through a bunch of halls and rooms and jump scares and then the game gives you an item and you open a door and you’re back in the studio. It just felt very much like I was just wandering around. There are occasionally extra doors where you kind find collectibles and such, but this game is really one of the most linear of these types of horror games I’ve ever played. I mean, people bashed the first Outlast for being too linear and this game makes the first Outlast look like an open world game. So, it ultimately just got very dull and very repetitive especially since I wasn’t connecting to the story at all. The game also features a really annoying mechanic wherein it is constantly changing things behind your back. So you’ll go into a room and there won’t be a way to get out, so you’ll turn around and suddenly the door you came in is gone and you’re facing a blank wall. So you’ll turn around again and then again and then again and then suddenly one of the walls in the room is gone and you’re looking down a hallway.



I’m fine with this conceptually, but as the game went on, it started requiring more turns to trigger the changes until it became very tedious and toward the end of the game, there were a couple of times where I just stood in the middle of the room and rotated for a while in order to trigger all the changes.

Anyway, let me just say a couple of things that I liked and then I’m done. Best thing about the game? No question: the credits. I know that sounds stupid, but check it out.



There’s a sketchbook you can find in game that has the credits and it contains these awesome sketches of all of the people who worked on the game. I was shocked, as I paged through it, to discover that it isn’t just the main devs or whatever. It appears that just about everybody, all the way down to the office assistant and the accountant, got a super-cool sketch as a credit. That’s amazing. I really loved going through that book and really studying all the sketches.

Second best thing is the score. It’s by Arkadiusz Reikowski and it’s really beautiful and haunting.



Anyway, the game isn’t a total loss. It isn’t, as I said, super-long and most people could get through it faster than I did, of course. And there was one section, that dealt with the painter’s daughter, that I did like quite a bit. It uses a crayon aesthetic that I really liked and it was a nice change of visuals. And it also culminated in the best scene in the game, a genuinely creepy scene in a nursery that ended with the game’s most creative jump-scare. And it was one of the few scenes in the game that really utilized the “turn around” mechanic well. I wouldn’t be surprised if this scene was where they came up with that mechanic and then decided to utilize it throughout the game. It’s a really good scene. And I did like the ending I got. There are three different possibilities and I watched the other two. I think I got the best one. It was satisfying.

But, on the whole, I felt it had a tremendous amount of potential and it was mostly wasted. Too bad. The copy of the game I got does have a copy of the DLC, Inheritance, included and I am going to play that because it has an interesting hook: the main character is the painter’s daughter, returning to her old home as an adult, trying to find closure for the trauma she suffered there. That actually sounds more interesting than this game.

 

All I remember from watching Layers of Fear being played was that it has a good concept and ending. I do not recall it actually being scary. Too bad because the premise is quite disturbing.

 

I like the Blair Witch game, but i'm biased because i'm invested in the mythology.

Finally finished the STALKER games. The last one was pretty good! Time to move on to the entire Assassin's Creed series. Will i finish before December 10th? Wish me luck!

Spoiler

Answer: no.

 

Lol no you will absolutely not. You might finish before December 10th of 2022 if you hurry.

 

I am going deep in the weeds playing Super Boy on the MSX. It's an unlicensed Super Mario Brothers clone. They must have gotten sued by Nintendo as it's nearly the same game, only not as good. The MSX had 3 SMB games. The second and third are actually different. It plays like a fan made SMB.

 

I just finished the campaign in Squadrons. I quite enjoyed the play through, but it wasn't the most compelling storyline I’ve encountered. To be honest, I get more fun from the multiplayer modes, but these are starting to get a bit repetitive.

I’ve now moved on to the Banner Saga and I really enjoy the animation and turn-based combat. I’ve only played for a few hours, but I got the all three instalments as part of a deal and I’m looking forward to playing through them.

 

I beat Dark Forces on psone recently, but used a level select code a few times when I was stuck. Cheated I did.

 

It takes me roughly 6-8 months through sheer discipline. Although, with Valhalla, it's going to be much longer.

 

I finished Miles Morales and man was it great. Every bit as good as the first game. And longer than I expected, with doing all the side stuff it was 15 hours. I absolutely cannot wait for Spider-Man 2 where presumably we do a Yakuza 0 and play as both Miles and Pete.

 

It seems like all Spider Man games are good. I don't have a newer system, but Spider Man on psone and Spider Man 2 on PS2 are both great.

 

Ehhhhhhh...

 

Star Wars Squadrons on PS4

 

The Talos Principle

While I liked the central puzzles well enough, the really interesting parts of the game lied in its story, conveyed largely through text files and chats. Never expected to be seriously contemplating my own existence whilst arguing passionately with a librarian AI, but this game managed to be thought provoking enough to elicit it. Very fascinating how it didn't just teach philosophy outright, it made you question, to think critically about the flaws in your own ethics. Never quite had a game translate something like that before, but I really like it.

Shame the puzzles were just super-arbitrary nonsense for the most part. Oh sure, on an intellectual most were stimulating enough, but they're so disconnected from anykind of storytelling. Just redirect some beams or stack some cubes and boom, that's it. If the gameplay had been more like, say, Myst, with fully integrated story and puzzles, it probably would have been more enjoyable. It lacked the certain spark, that unique mechanic, that a game like Portal has to make solving even the most basic puzzles a fun experience.

I beat about 90% of the standard game without hints (not the stars, I got a grand total of 4/30, the rest are too tricky ). The remaining 10% were either puzzles where I'd completely missed some important mechanic (eg. stacking boxes on floating killer drones lets you stand on top), or were ones which required a few too many leaps of lateral logic for me to quite reach the solutions (also a few that I could see from the offset would require such tedious positioning and back and forths that I just shrugged my shoulders, gave up, and walktthroughed my way to the ends ).

Overall, I'd rate the story and ambience elements quite highly (seriously, the recreation of open-air Roman ruins where the game opens are so close to the real thing it takes my breath away), but the puzzles felt much like busywork. Fun busywork, I must make clear, but timewasters between each nugget of story to chew into.

 

Exactly. Some of them are great.

 

Uncharted 4 (and Lost Legacy) adds an auto-aim feature that might help you out Chiznuk It locks onto nearby enemies, taking the pressure off precise aiming.

 

I think you're really gonna like 4. Can't wait for your thoughts.

 

Nope, you have Lost Legacy now.

Can't say I really like either Sam and Nadine, both felt too indulged and, like Cutter in 3, Nadine never recovered from the crappy QTE boss fights they went with.

 

See we are totally different. I love QTE fights. But even if I didn't, it wouldn't have anything to do with how I felt about a character.

 

Just Monika.

... sorry, my keyboard was taken over when I tried to type the name of the game