Developer Bloober Team's dizzying first-person haunted house horror game Layers of Fear is currently free on the Humble Store, and you even get its superb soundtrack thrown in.Layers of Fear received some fairly mixed reviews on release in 2016, but it's one of my absolute favourite horror games in recent years. On the one hand, it's pure, pulpy haunted house silliness (which I'm admittedly a sucker for), and certainly not afraid to pile on the hoary old genre cliches, or the endless YouTube-baiting jump scares. But it's also handsomely produced, with a surprisingly intelligent, emotionally robust core, which tips the whole thing more heavily into gorgeous, gothic melodrama.
Its real strength though comes in Bloober's knack for a disorientating set-piece, and Layers of Fear features some wonderfully effective horror sequences, all built around the house's penchant for constant reconfiguration and confounding geography. It's the kind of game where walls and corridors shift into ever-more impossible arrangements while your back is turned, and perfectly well-proportioned spaces suddenly become 600 feet tall.
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