Technical notes:

This game runs as expected without performance issues under Proton Experimental, though in order to prevent it from freezing intermittently it was necessary to disable raytracing. This can be done from the in-game settings, though if you encounter freezing before you can reach that menu, you can also add the argument "-noraytracing" to the game's launch options.

HDR functioned correctly. Enabling DLSS caused some ghosting of text on the UI, but nothing too distracting.

The game itself:

I remember having fun with the original 2016 game, but I guess it hasn't really stood the test of time, because I found Layers of Fear 2023 to be really quite boring.

The original always sort of felt like a sophomoric and cliched effort, like it was mostly just a good project to help the developers learn Unity (and, I suppose, ditto Unreal 5 for this remake). But I don't remember it being as uninteresting as this. Did they remove half of the scares or something? The combat sequences they added diminished the experience rather than adding to it, as well.

I can understand the skepticism people had about Silent Hill 2 looking back at Layers of Fear, because while Bloober started to get better with the likes of Blair Witch and The Medium, this one is pretty rough. If I had checked out of their games straight after Layers of Fear, I would definitely have been worried about their handling of Team Silent's magnum opus.

It's kind of crazy they're doing a third game, a novel tie-in, and some live action stuff, because there's really nothing here worth expanding on.

Reading this back, it sounds a little harsh, but my opinion took a pretty negative turn towards the end, particularly because it seemed like there was a lack of care throughout this remake. There are so many errors in the note transcripts, and even on the assets themselves. The voice overs sometimes don't match the notes you pick up, as though they were hastily rewritten in the recording booth. And the acting itself is pretty poor, with a lot of hammy delivery. I found their inconsistent handling of how to redact the notes quite distracting, and the language used doesn't really suit the period setting.

All of the Layers of Fear games are pretty missable unless, like me, you are curious about Bloober's earlier work and can grab the game on a significant discount.

Keeps crashing for me

I for the absolute life of me cannot get this game to run on Mac, even though it's "mac compatible". I've never, ever had issues such as getting basic functions to run properly (even for a single second, such as looking in a direction or walking). Because I payed for it I tried an hour straight to work around these issues, but the game is unplayable for me. I get stuck walking in a certain direction any time I try to move (with a 3 second lag), it glitches every time I try to look somewhere (again, 3 second lag), and I exhausted all options.