YMMV / Layers of Fear

• Alternative Character Interpretation: The Artist in a nut shell. The game offers evidence for many interpretations of his character. Is he a genuinely good man who was completely crushed by his wife's injuries and driven to obsessive insanity by her suicide? Is he a complete and utter monster, filled with selfish, petty, and disgusting thoughts that drove him to abuse and eventually murder his wife for no longer being beautiful? Or was he just a normal guy who did a horrible thing and became a Tragic Villain? One of the endings has the Artist's decision to draw himself might be a positive symbol of him accepting and moving on from the loss of his wife and daughter, or another instance of him selfishly putting himself above his family.
• Awesome Music: The main theme of the game is hauntingly beautiful.
• Critical Dissonance: Layers of Fear (2016) was met with mixed reviews from major outlets upon its full release, labeling it a predictable mess of bland jump scares and wasted potential; even as more positive reviews started rolling in, it still proved polarizing. The reception from fans and Let's Players at the time was more positive, who tended to draw comparisons to P.T..
• Disappointing Last Level: While the first four chapters are generally praised and considered the game's highlights, the reliance on opaque and occasionally buggy puzzles and overexposure of the game's single enemy keeps the last two chapters from reaching the same bar.
• Ending Fatigue: Layers of Fear (2016) seems ready to come to an end after the artist nearly drowns in the bathtub where his wife implicitly killed herself and the final component for the painting is retrieved — you even return to the art room. Then the game throws you into a tedious puzzle revolving around searching for minuscule checkers pieces in reused environments from previous chapters while little of note actually happens. The sequence packs few scares and doesn't illuminate anything more about the story, and it interrupts what was otherwise an intense climax. Many a Let's Player has been baffled and frustrated by this turn of events.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: The original Layers of Fear (2016) sparked more than a few comparisons to the ill-fated Silent Hills. Several years later, Konami would hire Bloober Team to develop the Video Game Remake of Silent Hill 2.
• Narm: If the sequence with the child bumping into a wall was meant to be anything other than hilarious, then the developer probably should've done it differently... and wouldn't have made it so the scare can repeat, allowing for endless children running into the wall.
• Spiritual Successor: Bears many similarities, both in atmosphere and story, to Silent Hills (with some nods to P.T. in particular), albeit with a visual style more reminiscent of Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs.
• Unexpected Character: Getting the bad ending in Layers of Fear 2 results in a meeting with the Rat Queen who crops up in some of the Artist's more disturbed paintings in the original game, giving the only hint of a connection to the first game and (so far) the franchise's only indicator that there might be a Greater-Scope Villain at work.

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