Remember when P.T. came out on the PS4 and everyone went wild for it, because Guillermo del Toro and Hideo Kojima had made the scariest thing ever? And then Konami cancelled Silent Hills and removed P.T. from the PlayStation store? Well, if you re hankering for a version of P.T. about an obsessive artist making a painting from bits of his dead wife, then boy, do I have a game for you! Yes, it s Layers Of Fear, the definitive ‘how-to’ for creatives who want to murder their loved ones and then rattle around their mansion for years, constantly haunted by their own memories.

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I’d missed that 2016’s first-person spooker Layers Of Fear was getting a sequel but: oh, it is. No, not Observer, the ace cyberspooky game that developers Bloober Team made next, an actual sequel with a number and everything. Layers Of Fear 2 is its name, and wandering a spooky boat telling the tale of a suffering actor is its game. They’ve even got a proper fancy actor to narrate this terrible tale, Tony Todd, who you might know as the Candyman or Worf’s brother off Star Trek. Here, hear his ace voice in this new trailer.

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A houseful of hauntings can be had for free right now, as Bloober Team are giving away Layers Of Fear for keepsies for the next few days on Steam. It’s a first-person spooker about a kooky-ooky painter who goes out his gourd trying to paint his masterpiece. Layers Of Fear is often a grab bag of clich s–dolls, shadowy figures crossing corridors ahead of you, jumpscares of terrible faces–that make it a bit hollow, but it does have some surprising and creative tricks particularly involving paintings. For free, sure, check out these spooky tricks.

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What do you call a storefront dummy wearing a Star Wars costume? Mannequin Skywalker. Hello, this post has nothing to do with Star Wars and only a little to do with mannequins. Painterly horror game Layers of Fear is free on Humble today. It s a short game, about three or four hours long, and contains ghosts. In many ways, the perfect stocking filler. (more…)

In Observer [official site], AKA David Cronenberg’s Bladerunner, Rutger Hauer is having a very bad day. It begins with a phone call, some family problems, and ends in blood and regret. Hauer lends his voice to the player character, who is the titular Observer, a special kind of cop who can jack into suspects’ memories, hopes and fears as a means of interrogation. To do so, he inserts a cable into a chip lodged in their brain and connects it to his own gray matter.

Around a quarter of the way through this particular grim night, he dives into the mind of a person who has just died, an act of necro-hacking that is totally against protocol. That’s when things get really> weird.

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First-person spooker Layers of Fear [official site] will receive an expansion in August, developers Bloober Team have announced. Named ‘Inheritance’, it’ll return to that mad painter’s house to poke around from his daughter’s perspective. The original game pulls some jolly clever tricks shifting between reality and artistic visions, so it’ll be interesting to see what awaits his daughter – and how that looks.

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“What would you do if your fears got hacked and used against you?” asks Observer, the latest first-person horror fest from Layers of Fear devs Bloober Team. I’d be suitably terrified, I imagine. Especially when this venture drops us into a cyberpunk world filled with glitch-ridden corridors, eery holograms, weird implant machinery and ominous shadow stalkers.

Aye, I’d say terrified pretty much covers it. Shall we watch its duo of trailers together after the drop? Go on, you first.

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Every corridor and room in Layers of Fear [official site] has something frightening hiding in its recesses. It might be an apparition, head rattling like an escapee from Jacob’s Ladder, or a piece of furniture that is preparing to launch itself across the room like the toy thrown from a poltergeist’s pram. The story of a painter attempting to overcome a creative block as he seeks to finish a masterpiece, it crept out of Early Access this week. Here’s wot I think.>

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Where do all these haunted paintings come from? eBay’s full of the devils, but the listings only say they bought it at a car boot sale or found it in the loft of an aunt who died of spooking – they never identify the painter. Maybe Layers of Fear [official site] will be able to answer a few questions. It’s a first-person spooker set inside the spooky house of a painter whose membrane is compromised. Maybe he paints ‘em all? We’ll find out, as after a stretch in Early Access Layers of Fear is heading for a full and proper release on February 16th.

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Each week Marsh Davies lets fly at the blank canvas of Early Access and either returns with a masterpiece or ends up rocking back and forth in a corner eating Unity Asset Store crayons. This week he s played Layers of Fear, a linear boo-scare walk-em-up set in the reassembling spooOOooky house of a maaAAaad painter.>

I m not sure a household needs more than one reproduction of The Abduction of Ganymede. It s a fine work, sure, but I don t want to be staring at a pissing toddler s dangling bum while I m having dinner, let alone every time I turn a corner in my home. But then, I m not really sure of a lot of the other decorative choices that my character appears to have made here – the cupboard of black phlegm, the infinite library, the hell mirror, the Erik Satie levitation cellar, the room of bad chairs. Not even Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen would go so far as to daub ABANDON HOPE WHILE YOU STILL CAN above a doorway. It doesn t even make sense, Laurence!

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