Layers of Fear Let's Play Part 2 | LARS OF FURS
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New game from Versace
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You take another drink as the canvas looms in front of you. A light flickers dimly in the corner. You’ve created countless pieces of art, but never anything like…this. Why haven’t you done this before? It seems so obvious in retrospect. Your friends, critics, business partners—soon, they’ll all see. But something’s still missing…
You look up, startled. That melody… Was that a piano? It sounded just like her… But, no—that would be impossible. She’s gone. They’re all gone.
Have to focus. How long has it taken to get to this point? Too long, but it doesn’t matter. There will be no more distractions. It’s almost finished. You can feel it. Your creation. Your Magnum Opus.
Dare you help paint a true Masterpiece of Fear? Layers of Fear is a first-person psychedelic horror game with a heavy focus on story and exploration. Delve deep into the mind of an insane painter and discover the secret of his madness, as you walk through a vast and constantly changing Victorian-era mansion. Uncover the visions, fears and horrors that entwine the painter and finish the masterpiece he has strived so long to create.
Let’s talk about something that I don’t think has ever come up in a year of Let’s Playing: non-linear space. I almost did a series on Anti-chamber, which is probably one of the more famous uses of non-linear space, but it was on the upper shelf of “games I can figure out how to play” on its own. Trying to make the gameplay entertaining on top of that? It wasn’t about to happen in the first few months of recording videos. But that is exactly what makes non-linear space so intriguing, it is complicated in a way that we can’t express in real world representations.
Non-linear space is where movement doesn’t necessarily track with your apparent movements. Think of it like one of those M.C. Escher paintings where you move along a seemingly flat path and somehow you end up higher than when you started. One way to think of this is that the direction you are moving matters with regard to where you are going. That sounds ridiculous - of course the direction matters if you are going to get anywhere, but it makes more sense when you see it in action. At several points in Layers of Fear we move out of one room, the door closes, and going back through the door takes us to another room. There are two ways to do this: one is to close the door, de-spawn the room, and load in another room to give the appearance of non-linear space, and the other is to make it so that moving through the door in different directions leads down different paths. For example imagine | is a doorway. You start in room A, and there is an exit to room B such that A | B. But room B exists in such a way that there is no exit to room A. There is no B | A. Instead there is an exit from room B that leads to room C such that B | C, and C occupies the same “map” coordinates as room A. Confused yet? Good.
In a later video, we will see a room where I walk around a hallway, make no noticeable change in elevation, but end up on a balcony overlooking a hallway I just walked through. Not only does my position seemingly change without me knowing, the game only progresses when you turn around and start going back along the path, making this truly a puzzle of navigating non-linear space. Non-linear movement lends itself to some really mind-bending ordeals that make the player feel uneasy and unsure about where to go. Most of all, this fights the player instinct to create a mental map because there is no concrete evidence that anything will stay where you left it. The mind can adapt itself to these new rules, but in a narratively linear game such as Layers of Fear, it really puts the player in a position of genuine confusion and disorientation. The challenge, as I see it, is applying this to stories and games that are not trying to make the player feel confused and anxious. Puzzle games are a good start, because the difficulty comes from navigating in a way that is unfamiliar to humans navigating a strictly 3 dimensional world (in terms of our constructs anyway). Can you think of any games that have used non-linear space well, regardless of genre?
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Mister Penguino presently has 214 views for Layers of Fear across 13 videos, with his channel uploading 3 hours worth of Layers of Fear videos. This makes up 1.73% of the content that Mister Penguino has uploaded to YouTube.