When playing undocked, the scaling back of textures makes sense for the system but the game still looked really good regardless of that. The few I have played have usually been smaller indie games with either a simplistic or pixel style of art so I wondered how something as detailed as Layers of Fear 2 would do on the Switch. I haven’t had the chance to play many horror games on my Switch yet. Luckily though if you just want the atmospheric spooks and great storytelling without the pressure of being chased down as well, you’ll have the option to turn off the encounters in the games’ “Safe Mode”.

This can be frustrating later on as you’ll probably find yourselves redoing the chases multiple times in order to figure out which path is the correct way to go to avoid death. The enemies you’ll encounter chase you down corridors but more often than not, are one-hit kills if caught. Some of the puzzles are almost too easy to solve while others feel almost too impossible to solve due to lack of information or requiring an answer that just seemed way too illogical to figure out. The puzzles we run into are a bit of a mixed bag. This really freaked me out for some reason as it somehow felt more personal and allowed players to really embody the protagonist further. Holding down the ‘ZR’ button players will have to move the thumbstick accordingly to interact with the said item. There aren’t any items you can defend yourself with and you’ll only be able to interact with doors, objects and levers. When starting up the game, Layers of Fear 2 wastes no time in getting the action started and immediately sets our players towards this nightmare trip of a lifetime. Heeding the directions of the mysterious Director, we find ourselves traversing throughout the vessel where past events begin to unravel, forcing our protagonist to relive past traumas, disjointed memories all while we witness the reality we thought we knew to start to crumble away. Layers of Fear 2 puts us in the role of a Hollywood actor who finds himself on a seemingly abandoned cruise liner. Meaning we have an entirely new setting, characters, and storyline from the first game in the series. While this is a sequel, it’s only so in title.

Layers of fear storyline