Layers of Fear (2016)
Fair · Narrative · 2016
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
NO RUSH.
Fair at $19.99. Buy it if you want it.
- Length
- 3.4h
- Value
- $5.88/hr
- Reviews
- 88% positive
Recent reviews trending down: 80% over the last 30 days against 88% all-time.
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Minimum on the Steam store: 4 GB of memory, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 1GB / Radeon R7 250X 1GB, 5 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
A first-person psychological horror with a strong emphasis on atmosphere and storytelling. Explore an ever-shifting Victorian mansion as a painter seeking to complete his masterpiece, even at the cost of his own sanity.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
It has never been cheaper than $1.99. That was November 2024. It has been discounted 55 times in the 11 years tracked here, typically at 75 percent off, with about 5 weeks between sales. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 4 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 5 weeks.
Value puts it in the top 15 percent of the games it competes with. It is pricier than 93 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 89 percent. Among the games that feel like it, The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe ($24.99, scores 60) beats it on value, while it beats Blair Witch ($29.99, scores 34).
73 from critics against 88 percent from players, and the player number comes from people who own the game.
Steam's global achievement data says about 8 percent of players ever finish it. On a 3.4-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. Players rate it 88 percent positive over its lifetime, but the last 30 days run 80 percent. Something recent has soured the room. This site sampled 800 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 6 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written September 2021 to September 2026. That is fewer refunded reviewers than 7 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 1,677 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 1,013 have a larger share. Inside the two-hour refund window, 83 percent of the 2,386 reviews written there were positive, against 88 percent overall, and those are 18 percent of everything written about it.
3.4 hours to finish it, 12 to exhaust it. The completionist tail is 3.4 times the campaign.
The drop-off
52% start to 8% finishMost players never reach the end. On a 3.4-hour game, that's a lot you pay for and may never use. Steam global achievements
Players
17 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
I can't believe it. I bought the game because I've seen it's a classic in the genre. I saw it's about art- a topic deeply personal for me so I purhased. I started the game, went inside the house, then the living room. I was impressed by the design of the house and how "lively" it felt, despite the circumstances. But the music... Oh the song... I was looking around, finding and reading notes, already sensing how...
The game is neither really scary nor artistically interesting. Its a walking sim that tries to wrap you into a spooky story, that never quite got me.
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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Layers of Fear (2016) scores 53/100 on the BANG Score (fair value). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/391720/layers-of-fear-2016The BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 12, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.