I loved Layers Of Fear 1 and 2, and I'm excited for 3, but I have to say I am unimpressed with this remake of 1. What I do like is the new world, it looks great, the voice acting is nice and I enjoy the new puzzles. What I do not like are the game breaking bugs, changes to the first story to force in new mechanics. What made 1 different from 2 big spoilers ahead is that the monster couldn't hurt you, but you are still scared because of the phycological aspect. They completely remove that for generic run from the monster time which even scary. In this remake you are forced to fight your wife (and turn her to goo??) or repeat the same part of the story the 2016 version is better from a story perspective. "tip the scales" to me is a cheap replacement for the emotional weight of the decisions you make in 1 to get the wife and daughter ending. imo if you want the best experience play the 2016 version for The Painters story. The og id give a 7-8 outa 10 but this remake is easily a 3 out of 10, they ruined it. play the 2016 version instead I can not stress it enough.

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