These days, developer Bloober Team is perhaps best known for its wonderful work on last year’s stupendous Silent Hill 2 remake, but the studio’s horror oeuvre goes much farther back. And it’s bringing its first big hit – and its ship-bound sequel – to Switch 2 very soon. Layers of Fear: The Final Masterpiece Edition comes to Nintendo’s platform on 19th December.
Announced back in October, Layers of Fear: The Final Masterpiece Edition is a version of Bloober’s 2023 Layers of Fear remake, with a few added extras thrown in. The remake, if you’re unfamiliar, was a bit of an unusual proposition, taking both Layers of Fear games (plus new story bits and old DLC) and weaving them together into a single, interlinking narrative.
That means you got Layers of Fear 1 and its surreal first-person horror trip through the ever-shifting mansion of a tortured painter; its Inheritance DLC and a brand-new chapter featuring the painter’s wife; its 2018 sequel – inspired by the golden age of Hollywood – which followed a brand-new protagonist on an avant-garde journey through the innards of an ocean liner and their troubled past, plus a new framing device focusing on a lighthouse-bound character known as The Writer, tying the whole thing together. All with enhanced visuals and new gameplay elements, including a lantern to ward off shadowy terrors.
Switch 2’s The Final Masterpiece Edition includes all the above, plus the remake’s Final Prologue chapter which originally released as post-launch DLC. It also promises HDR, ray tracing, and dynamic lighting, alongside support for touchscreen and motion controls. It’s a whole lot of Layers of Fear, in other words – which is fine by me. The series might be a little rough around the edges compared to Bloober’s more recent stuff, but I’m a sucker for any game that goes all-in on the sheer hallucinatory spectacle – and Layers of Fear’s ever-shifting spaces make for a wonderfully disorientating, gleefully surreal time.
Layers of Fear: The Final Masterpiece Edition comes to Switch 2 via Nintendo’s eShop on 19th December, where it’ll cost $39.99. Its arrival follows the launch of Bloober’s sci-fi horror Cronos: The New Dawn on the platform, and the studio has also confirmed an unnamed Switch 2 exclusive is on the way.
