#Layers of fear 2 mannequins skin#
#Layers of fear 2 mannequins free#

That doesn’t sound especially terrifying in itself, but it’s the way that Layers of Fear 2 weaves a medley of surreal imagery together that makes it deeply unsettling. In a few puzzles, you’re asked to literally go through a (brief, thankfully) reel of film, frame by frame, to find key details that you can then splice together.

#Layers of fear 2 mannequins free#

You have free reign to move the first-person camera about as you please, but it’s only by looking at things from a certain angle, or positioning yourself to compose a shot the way a camera operator would, that the solution becomes clear. Similarly, a lot of the game’s puzzles rely on things like framing and camera perspective to solve. That’s the magic of the cinematic cut, and Layers of Fear 2‘s creative adaptation of that technique to a videogame format works wonders. But that’s deliberate it’s not just a haphazard collection of random scenes, but a way of weaving a story and conveying ideas through the juxtaposition of different shots. You’ll follow the only path forward, wind up in what seems like a dead end, then turn around and see that the way you just came has been replaced wholesale by a completely different set.Ĭompared to the typical videogame structure, it sounds disjointed-and it is, I guess.

You’ll open a door from the hallway of a cruise liner’s lower decks and suddenly find yourself on a stage adorned with a prop pirate ship and a sea of cardboard cutout waves, and then exit stage right into a creepy old-timey living room with a chair suspended in the air. Instead of a “natural” progression from room to room that fit together logically-a game design equivalent of a continuous, single shot in film- Layers of Fear 2‘s scenery changes suddenly and drastically. The way the different scenes and locations of the game feed into one another is reminiscent of how film editing tells a story through cuts. Layers of Fear 2 is “cinematic” in the true sense of the word: it makes deliberate use of the sort editing, framing, and shooting techniques that have come to define cinema-and it does so while almost never taking control away from you and cutting to a “cutscene”. Usually when people describe a game as “cinematic”, they mean “it has lots of cutscenes and high production values”. Likewise, the very structure of the game mimics the language of cinema in clever, creative ways. However, the ship’s cabins and decks soon start giving way to surreal scenes, drawing on everything from The Wizard of Oz to Georges Méliès’ Le Voyage dans la Lune ( A Trip to the Moon), from Nosferatu to The Shining. You’re cast as an unnamed actor in the 1930s, starring in a film that’s being shot on an ocean liner at the hands of a mysterious director. Layers of Fear 2 is as much a trip through the history of cinema as it is a horror game.

#Layers of fear 2 mannequins skin#

When so many games are trying to be the next viral hit by hitting streamers with jump scares, it’s a rare treat to play something that’s more interested in getting under the skin and embedding a feeling of dread that sticks around long after the credits roll that’s more interested in using horror to explore an idea than just deliver scares for scares’ sake. It’s so refreshing to play a horror game like Layers of Fear 2.