You'll walk through a door to find an empty wall. It's linear, and if there are choices to be made, it's unclear where they are or what effects they have because so much else in the game is so linear. Much of the trip through the setting, though, feels sort of like an ultra-high-end haunted house.
The sequences that engage these effects are memorable and help the game stand out. You'll also wander down hallways lined with oozing, glistening oil, or see what used to look like an inhabited room, now covered in the stuff. As you do, the room and the phonograph itself melt like oil paints, and mutate when the music plays out of key and out of speed, but as you reach the correct setting things start to reveal reality. One room has you trying to get a record to play at the correct speed, manipulating the phonograph's different controls. The oil in these paintings starts to take over the world around you as you lose your grip on sanity, making for many of the game's best set pieces. You're in the shoes of a painter, constantly surrounded by artwork that makes you want to look away. They're not ultra-detailed nightmare fuel from historical artists like Hieronymus Bosch, but they're certainly discomforting, and this focus on art pervades the game. The house, even in its state closest to reality, is filled with grotesque paintings.
The game is built in the Unity engine, the more easily accessible alternative to the much more popular Unreal Engine, but it doesn't feel like the look and feel of the game have been shortchanged because of that decision.
Layers of Fear is very much gothic horror, and you spend the whole game wandering a Victorian-esque home somewhere near the turn of the century. Both in the way it looks from moment to moment and with some of the tricks it plays. Where Layers of Fear excels, without question, is in the visuals. Despite the winding path Layers of Fear's protagonist takes, it doesn't often venture off that path, though that's not necessarily a bad thing all the time.
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