While many players have tried to unravel the many mysteries behind the painter’s true motive, the Bloober Team has decided to lift the veil on some Inheritance. Probably one of the best survival horror of the year (also due to lack of other new games in the genre) Layers of Fear‘s main story takes us the through the mad mind of a painter, seeking to complete his masterpiece. Thankfully this doesn’t kill off all sense of dread, but it does make the horror angle a little more toothless.Following the success of Layers of Fear, independent studio Polish Bloober decided to extend their horror “walking Simulator” by offering us a brand new DLC by the name of: Inheritance. There’s far less trepidation and dread to Inheritance than there was with the main game, and that’s simply down to that knowledge that the things you saw in Layers of Fear are more than likely all from a very sick mind, and not a haunted house.
Inheritance does have a few small moments that prickle the hairs on your neck and perhaps one jump scare, but your knowledge of the main story negates much of any threat. There is the question of horror that needs addressing. It’s not frustrating, but the illusion of always being led in the right direction by instinct that the main game did so well is diminished as a result. This leaves you unable to see visual clues for where to go next simply because the lighting is still fixed at the height of a regular person instead of the child’s perspective you’re at. Progression strangely doesn’t feel quite as smooth in Inheritance, and that appears to be the combination of the new viewpoint in some sections being coupled with the darkness of the rooms. Beyond that, there’s some standout moments of surrealism that include a stairwell made up of cluttered children’s toys, a looping room that has a whiff of P.T. This is completely unlike the scene in the main game where a small, boxed in room was made to look like it was drawn by a child in that this new area bears little resemblance to the architecture of the house proper. There’s a scene early on where an entire room is made up of crayon sketches that create what appears to be a park, complete with pathways, trees and a lurking threat slithering in the background. What Inheritance adds is a layer of childhood imagination to the visual design. You know the ones: creepy dolls, children’s laughter, the scenery changing when your back is turned, that sort of thing. Of course, Inheritance is still Layers of Fear, so the other, more well-traveled tricks from the main game bleed into this DLC as well.
Many of the memories are played from the perspective of the daughter’s childhood height, furthering the already surreal nature of Layers of Fear’s visual tricks with a viewpoint not often seen in first person titles.
Each room of the house provides a trigger point for a seemingly repressed memory, each dripping in the game’s trademark dreamlike design. Here in Inheritance, we get a bit of clarity on the extent of the painter’s rage and insanity as his daughter recalls less than fond memories of his tutelage in the arts from her childhood, and her mother’s painful final days. By that point, neither the player nor the character seem to know if the viciousness being displayed and explained has actually happened, but you know that at the very least this was a very troubled and angry man indeed. It portrayed him in a slightly more sympathetic light for the most part, but as the game reached its conclusion we began to see the uglier side of his paranoid obsession. In the main game, our viewpoint was that of the angry, mad painter and his repeated attempts to perfect his masterpiece, seeing the effect his madness had on his long-suffering wife and innocent child. Only the echo of memories are familiar with what we saw previously, the daughter’s memories, and they take Layers of Fear’s already head-spinning manipulation of the environment and push it into somewhere far more surreal. This time of course, the foyer is not dimly lit and filled with rich hues of brown and orange: Rather it is cold, dark, and in terrible disrepair. When the story begins, it does so in the same manner as the main game’s tale, as she steps through the front door and surveys the foyer of the house. Her father is now gone, and the home has been given to her in his will.
The title should give you a clue as to why she’s finally decided to come back to a place that appeared to be the scene of such misery and hurt. So now, many years later, she’s returned to that former home, now a dilapidated shell of its former splendor. Inheritance focuses on the daughter,and it turns out that whatever may or may not have happened to her, she did escape her father’s volatile homestead.
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