To be honest it often was a struggle for us to keep it quiet in some parts of the game as the sound and music guys did a tremendous job and it was almost heart-breaking to devoid the players of enjoying their skills more often. Lack of sound is often the most disturbing sound, so there are a lot of silent corridors in the game. We observed the players’ reactions to see how they react to different parts of the game and, based on that, tailored it to a state it is now. However internal and external tests were pivotal in the finishing touches. We worked mostly on our gut feeling and we were satisfied with the effects we achieved. Indeed sound and music design played a major role in building the atmosphere of the game. Is it difficult to know when to create sound to enhance a scene and when to let the silence take over? Having played it myself, I found the most unnerving moments to be when dark and silent hallways waited beyond closed doors. Sound design seems to play a major role in Layers of Fear, especially the absence of sound. "Psychedelic" best defined the experience that we wanted to serve the players. Both euphoria (of creating a masterpiece painting) and the despair (tragedies that the protagonist had to endure) are parts of the main plot. The main idea for the game was to change the environment in real time, distorting the perception of players and leaving them with a hallucination-like feeling. The dictionary definition of psychedelic is "a mental state characterized by a profound sense of intensified sensory perception, sometimes accompanied by severe perceptual distortion and hallucinations and by extreme feelings of either euphoria or despair". For those who haven’t tried it yet, can you describe what about the game makes it psychedelic? That’s an interesting word to use because we don’t see that often as a descriptor. You’ve billed Layers of Fear as a “psychedelic” horror. It’s easy to get inspired by all of the great work other people have done in the genre. Our team is very fond of the horror genre, be it movies, books or games, and we try to watch, read and play almost everything that hits the market. Gaming wise, Amnesia: the Dark Descent was more of an inspiration for us than P.T., but if you would ask our designers what inspired them, almost everyone would provide different titles. had influence over our project, but our main inspiration was The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde and the masterwork paintings from the past centuries focusing on the art of ugliness movement that has been present in our culture for decades. Once we saw that there are fans waiting for such an experience, we felt it was our opportunity to see this idea through. It was a type of game that for a long time we wanted to make but never really started the production. It showed that people are fond of games built on the mood and atmosphere. proved that there is a market for more ambitious horror games, ones where you don’t have to run from enemies or cheaply scare the player. How much of an influence did that concept demo have on your game and what other influences do you cite? Layers of Fear continues to be branded, at least by journalists and bloggers, as a spiritual successor of the cancelled P.T./Silent Hills project.
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