Epic continues to dish out the freebies this week, gifting Blooper Team's surreal haunted house horror Layers of Fear and Toxic Games' first-person puzzler QUBE 2 to anyone willing to deploy their mouse finger and clicky-button them into their Epic Games Store library.

Layers of Fear isn't exactly fresh to the freebie scene, but the 2016 spook-'em-up is well worth checking out if you haven't done so already. It might not be particularly terrifying - its over-reliance on clatter-bangy jumpfrights puts pay to that pretty early on - but it's a wonderfully woozy experience, and a bit of a personal favourite for all its faults.

What it lacks in sustained horror, it makes up for in sheer hallucinatory spectacle, constantly reassembling the gorgeous gothic interiors of its spooky old house into ever-more disorientating, gleefully surreal configurations, as you, a tortured artist, slowly unravel.

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We pass through passages and hallways everyday without pause. They're boring, empty, uneventful dead-spaces unworthy of consideration - not so much architecture to stop and appreciate, as infrastructure to quickly pass through. All they do is channel things around buildings, moving us from one room to the next. But while we so often take these in-between areas for granted, rushing down them in order to reach places of real importance, they can also be incredibly evocative.

Corridors are anxious, uneasy places, and horror has a history of using them to put us on edge. They're rarely the site of explicit terror or violence, but they lead us there. Zones of anticipatory fear, the corridor is conducive to horror through its ability to heighten suspense and gesture to the unknown. What lies around the corner, or beyond that door? Every hallway is a world of undetermined possibility.

Roger Luckhurst, a professor at the University of London and expert in all things horror, recently penned a book about corridors. He's quick to mention the Resident Evil series and the various facilities of the Umbrella Corporation, where horror is sometimes confined and squeezed into a particularly pure form. On many occasions the video game corridor is a gauntlet (in the Resident Evil spinoffs for example). In these corridor shooters, the constrictive form of the horror hallway becomes a condenser for an adrenaline-fuelled onslaught where you're forced to hack or blast your way through a narrow, zombie-infested space.

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Layers of Fear was a turning point for Polish studio Bloober. Before it, Bloober had a reputation for poor games, but Layers began something new.

It began a specialisation in a kind of insidious horror game - a horror which doesn't rely on jump scares (although it does use some) but which is strange, eerie and unsettling. In Layers you are a painter in a mansion, but all is not what it seems.

Layers is a bit rough but it's interesting, which counts for so much. And today, for a limited time, Layers of Fear is free to download and keep forever on Steam, so I suggest you get it.

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I was a huge wimp when I was younger. The strangest things would unsettle me. Red Skull in the very dodgy early 1990s version of Captain America terrified me for some unfathomable reason. I didn't sleep for days. Walking past Aliens action figures in Woolworths scared the life out of me, simply because I'd played five minutes of Aliens on the Commodore 64 and it was far too atmospheric for my overly imaginative mind. That's how absurd it was.

As a teenager, I avoided many films and games. Things I would have clearly loved because of a great storyline, like The Shining or the Silent Hill games. It wasn't the end of the world, but it did make me feel a bit daft that I hadn't grown out of such fears.

And then the world actually ended. Or at least, the world I once knew did. My dearly loved father died suddenly, and it was beyond awful. In the space of about 30 minutes, I went from a fairly regular 23-year-old to a temporarily broken husk of a person. Turns out it's even worse than you can imagine. It's incredibly emotionally gruelling and horrific. It throws your world off-kilter, leaving you unable to trust in anything. Because, really, if someone can go from healthy to convulsing to dead in a short space of time in the middle of the night, why would you feel safe about anything ever again?

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Observer and Layers of Fear developer Bloober Team has announced a new game codenamed Project M li s, presumably after famous French film maker Georges M li s.

A teaser trailer shows film reels hanging in the air among other debris, and what could be a messy editing desk at the end.

Friday the 13th publisher Gun Media has signed Project M li s up, and the game's theme appears once again to be an eerie kind of psychological horror - something of a speciality for Bloober. No other details have been revealed but will be in the "near future", Gun said.

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Developer Bloober Team's dizzying first-person haunted house horror game Layers of Fear is currently free on the Humble Store, and you even get its superb soundtrack thrown in.

Layers of Fear received some fairly mixed reviews on release in 2016, but it's one of my absolute favourite horror games in recent years. On the one hand, it's pure, pulpy haunted house silliness (which I'm admittedly a sucker for), and certainly not afraid to pile on the hoary old genre cliches, or the endless YouTube-baiting jump scares. But it's also handsomely produced, with a surprisingly intelligent, emotionally robust core, which tips the whole thing more heavily into gorgeous, gothic melodrama.

Its real strength though comes in Bloober's knack for a disorientating set-piece, and Layers of Fear features some wonderfully effective horror sequences, all built around the house's penchant for constant reconfiguration and confounding geography. It's the kind of game where walls and corridors shift into ever-more impossible arrangements while your back is turned, and perfectly well-proportioned spaces suddenly become 600 feet tall.

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