They are different women because he can't remember her as he loved her, because he mostly remembers her as a monster. That's why they are failed and the good ending has him drawing her and saying 'yes that's it!'.

Frequently, I do not understand games. Sometimes it is really helpful to see a video saying "no you aren't dumb. the idea was presented poorly."

That voice acting on the bathroom scene makes it sound like his wife had clogged the toilet or used up all the toilet paper, not that he'd walked in and found her dead...

So, that baby running into the wall bit in the original release (pre patches) you could constantly retrigger it by walking back and forth over the trigger

I like that mentioning Indigo Park has become a running gag now

24:37 Such a haunting performance  you could really feel how much she meant to him, and by that I mean none whatsoever.

I’m guessing the neutral ending implies he can’t remember what his wife looks like. So his image being mutated is him being pissed because even though he’s done it before he still can’t remember her face prior to the fire. Which is why the true ending he gets it right. It would also show just how shallow he is that this woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with meant so little that he can’t even recall what she looks like even though he’s painted her before. Bad ending obviously means he stopped giving a damn because he sucks.

One thing I like about this game is the ending where he ends up painting himself. Especially if the most common ending is at least somewhat real too. His endless attempts to create his magnum opus after the image of his late wife who he had caused to suffer so much, only to end up drawing himself. He had failed to recreate the beauty and love that he'd once felt towards his wife, and the way his portrait is shown makes me feel like all his abuse was brushed under the rug. There he is, perfect and immortal, on that museum wall, and no one would know or care about what a horrible person he was in life, because his art is so great.

Funny enough. I think I just realized what the whole Checkers thing is about. There's a small drawing of a little girl on the back of a checker. And in some iterations of the game you flip the checker over once it reaches the other side. That scene was about his wife telling him he's going to be a Father. And later the part with the scattered checkers is about his Daughter.

Still think this game is bad. But just thought I'd share.

My favorite part of the game is when the painter is at the end of his rope and fully admits “The Layers of my Fear are great, and I fear it might be my Inheritance owed from my mistakes.”

30:56 I honestly don't think that that's the case. The way I see it, each canvas showing a slightly different woman implies that he's forgetting what his wife looked like slowly, trying to get the features right but never succeeding, trying over and over again. But that could be just me. Great video as always dude! And not to sound like a creep, but your hair is GORGEOUS. Consider me jealousssss

For horror games without active threats, I've heard a few people praise Soma after an update removed the hostility from the monsters, since the horror comes from the existentialism and environment rather than the monsters which the chase sequences can detract from.

Remember, his daughter is DEFINITLY not dead!

I remember when I first played this it was because it had the walking simulator tag, I had no idea that it was a horror game. As the "scares" kept happening, I wasn't getting more engaged, I was just getting bored. It felt like they heard Dark Souls get praise for having a scattered story and tried to do that without knowing you need a deeper lore than "What if guy had nightmare."

I remember finding it so irritating that the rooms and hallways would change literally Every Time you turned around. It was actually unsettling the first few times, it could have been unsettling throughout if they used it sparingly, but instead I felt like I was being stalked by stagehands at all times. Theatre kids aren't scary, they're nerds.

Tbh the literal writing on the wall is probably actually there. As someone who has had experiences with hallucinations and severe paranoia (my old ADHD meds were not kind to me, made me see shadow people out of the corner of my eye, and one day they just started coming out of the walls,) I can confirm that's kinda a thing you can just do. I was pretty young, around 12, and hadn't really been exposed to any horror media besides the dvd cases of horror movies at Family Video, and I kinda just started organically writing cryptic warnings to myself on the walls, carving them into my toy chest, scrawling them on random paper. Literal writing on the wall is kinda just a thing you can feel compelled to do if you're paranoid and melodramatic enough.

I am a big fan of kinda trashy and morally-bankrupt psychological horror, so I have an ongoing love/hate affair with this one. The game has good "turn brain off and replay" value for me, since the scariest thing about about it is what your next hearing exam is going to look like. Layers of Fear and Outlast 1 were both my go-to "i have nothing else to do" games because they were so mindless on a seventh playthrough. I still see the halls of Mount Massive Asylum when I close my eyes. Because my hobby is overthinking bad series until there's nothing I haven't seen in them: I've been connecting Layers of Fear to it's VERY proud inspiration, The Picture of Dorian Gray. They feature Oscar Wilde in that game so heavily, he's in nearly every room. They want you to know the game was inspired by Dorian Gray so so so bad. They grabbed the best and worst qualities of three characters and mashed them together for a Before and After. Before, the Painter loved the Musician as his "muse" the way Basil loved Dorian, making his art better and fuelling his passion- but straighter. After, he treats her the way Dorian had treated Sybil Vane once her acting became "ugly", leading to both the Musician and Sybil's deaths (and then the Painter and Dorian being temporarily obsessed with how terrible they are).

They completely subverted the portrait itself while keeping it's themes. Dorian endlessly mocked his portrait for collecting his age and sins while he stayed young and beautiful- but the Musician was mocked by hers for being scarred and basically disabled while it stayed abled and beautiful. Dorian hid his portrait from everyone because he was paranoid people would see it and know he was a horrible person, but the Musician hid herself away because she was seen as horrible while the portrait was admired. When Dorian tries to destroy the portrait it kills him and their places are traded (he looks old and the portrait is young), but when the Musician kills herself the portrait becomes scarred and disturbs the Painter just like she did (making them the same). Dorian was haunted by his portrait in life and the Musician haunts her own in death. They were both painted by artists who saw their sitters as living art and both have themes of beauty, cruelty, and immortality, but both existed and impacted the characters in completely different ways. Unfortunately all that clever subversion is in a 2010s-era Bloober game that makes you work to get the story, and it makes me grit my teeth. It's like finding a collector's item in the dumpster for me. It's a beautiful thing and I'm thrilled to have it in my hands, but at what cost? it's covered in grime :(

Mfg I love that kid running straight into a wall lmao

my submission to the question of horror games without active threats is kitty horrorshow's Anatomy, which doesnt even have a death mechanic, and still is the scariest game ive ever played. its not fear of what will happen to you in the game, its fear of what the game will do to you, if that makes sense.

I swear, the guy finding out his wife committed suicide sounded not distraught but disappointed.


“Oh, honey. What have you done THIS time?”