The painting will change from a broken snake to a doodle of clouds (and get a round of angry ranting from your father, who thinks crayons are beneath his child). Grab the yellow crayon sitting on the ground near the letters.įollow the path back to the easel and interact with the painting while you have the yellow crayon in your inventory. Right after the sign, you should see “Let Me Out” scrawled on the floor.

The lever turns on the lamps that reveal a path further into the land of fables.įollow the red path and the flickering lights forward until you see the danger sign with the symbol of the snake. Go forward from the easel and pull the red lever sitting on the ground. Grab the crayon and interact with the painting to go into the land of fables where everything is drawn like a children's cartoon. Taking a peek at the hazy paper transports you to a different version of the room where you have to choose between a crayon (which takes you to child's painting universe) or a paint brush (which takes you to the world of the realistic landscape). Going To The Land Of FablesĪfter turning on the flashlight and leaving the foyer through the glass doors, take the first left into the main panting room where an indistinct sheet of paper is sitting on the dresser (to the right of the stack of rolled up papers and the knocked over coat rack). If you finish the tasks in the landscape world, you won't have the ability to head back and grab this achievement later. With Gone Home, while there was an intended path to go through, the gamespace was wide enough that you could take your time and explore the various rooms and be rewarded with more tidbits about what happened and fleshed out the plot.Nabbing the Sword Of The Serpent achievement (and overcoming the memory of your insane father's hateful ranting) requires that you switch back and forth between two different areas instead of fully completing either of them. Forcing the player onto a single path means that you can’t get a sense of exploration, and too much of the horror is walking around waiting for a jumpscare to pop up. It felt like the developers were trying to go with a combination of Amnesia’s horror styling and Gone Home’s exploration and discover the plot on your own, but the two don’t work combined. It’s hard to describe it, but it felt like I was dragging my character around from room to room to the point where I started to get a slight headache from the motion like with Amnesia. I noticed some weird framerate skipping while events loaded up, and the game has that “janky” movement seen in Amnesia. Then there are the technical issues to discuss. Miss a piece of lore, and your only option is to reload the game or replay it, but given the linearity, I don’t see that happening too often. The game always pushes you forward with locked doors and disappearing rooms making sure that the experience is kept as linear as possible. Puzzles are of the basic variety with a few pixel hunting parts for good measure. When things go crazy, Layers of Fear has an amazing/disturbing aesthetic. While you will be moving from room to room, you’ll quickly find the house taking on a life of its own: Rooms disappearing, doors moving when your back is turned and of course nightmarish distortions right out of the Silent Hill playbook. As a great touch, the game makes use of the visual styling of a distorted or messed up normality quite well.

Jump scares are a plenty in Layers of Fear of course I’m not going to spoil any of them here. Similar to Amnesia and Gone Home, you’re going to spend the majority of your time wandering around the house looking for clues and the next important event to move forward. The story is that you are an artist returning to your home to complete your masterpiece, but as with games of this kind, there is a dark secret about the house and your life waiting to be revealed. While the game has a great visual style and hook, there just isn’t much to do other than to jump at the scares. Layers of Fear is another game in what is becoming a long line of horror house-styled games from the Indie market trying to capture the magic of Amnesia the Dark Descent.

Layers of fear theory