It wasn’t their first game, but exactly ten years ago the world was introduced to the Polish studio Bloober Team through Layers of Fear. On the heels of the P.T. heartbreak, 2016’s Layers of Fear was a pared down, first-person psychological horror game concerning a painter suffering from a bout of Poe-inspired madness. Effective visuals and novel jump scares put Bloober Team on the road to a buffet of projects, including the 2024 remake of Silent Hill 2. In late January, Bloober Team began teasing a new project. This weekend that curtain pulled back to reveal Layers of Fear 3.
The new teaser is live action, featuring a man who splits the difference between Peter Stormare in Constantine and Jeff Daniels in The Martian (but dubbed like a Disneyland actor’s Hannibal Lecter). At first it appears we’re back to basics. A man huffing roses, reading William Blake poems and enjoying the fireside company of spooky paintings from previous games. A lunchtime alarm from a smart watch betrays the fact that we’re currently set in the present, whereas previous games lingered well into the past.
In the original Layers of Fear you played as a painter whose descent into his rat-infested estate and collection of grisly paintings suggested your antagonist did some not-so-nice stuff to the people around him. It featured impressive visuals and made frequent use of Bloober Team’s trademark “the room changes like crazy when your back is turned” thing. Layers of Fear 2 stuck the formula in a new setting, a cruise ship where your mysterious character recounts the cursed production of a 1940s film. The novel setting, nods to early cinema and Tony Todd couldn’t save its tangled, unfocussed plot. A big step down from its predecessor, but their flagship series is hardly the main story for Bloober Team anymore.
The studio has racked up a huge portfolio in a very short time. They’ve strayed far from their comfort zone with The Medium and last year’s dark science fiction game Cronos: The New Dawn. Their batting average is just as wily. The 2019 Blair Witch video game adaptation is likely their worst, trading the film’s thick tension and ambiguities for slimy out-of-pocket shock value. That made it all the more surprising when their highest-stakes project, a remake of the most beloved survival horror game of all time, was…good! Their Silent Hill 2 beat the haters, myself included.
With an unexpected Silent Hill renaissance in full swing and Bloober Team’s remake of the first game en route, a countdown from January caught people’s attention. The teaser’s rose pattern motif made some fans speculate that Bloober was gearing to tackle Rule of Rose, Yoshiro Kimura’s long-lost and controversial PS2 survival horror game about a most unpleasant orphanage. Kimura, who released Stray Children last year, has floated the idea of a rerelease in newsletters while re-emphasizing that it’d be tricky.
Instead, “rose” seems to be referring to all manner of subjects in the teaser. A potential object of affection. A pull from the Blake poem. A literal flower. We’ll learn just how bad we’re going to go for this rose when Layers of Fear 3 eventually drops in the near future.