Once again, it’s far easier to just give up. That’s by design to help more effectively communicate the themes.Īnother big choice presented is whether to fight for what’s necessary to survive or to just give up. Layers of Fear 2 is always putting pressure on you to do things a certain way, and fighting back against that is an uphill battle. Standing up to the Director is always made to be more difficult that simply going with the flow of his instruction. Only those who persist in putting a bullet into the male are able to make that hard choice. At this point, many players would simply turn and shoot the other one, killing the woman. If you choose to shoot the male first, you’re basically told “that’s wrong” and to choose again. There’s a difficulty of going against the Director that plays into the gameplay mechanics as well. The Director, or society, wants James to suppress and kill their female side.
In retrospect, this decision is the first of many that indicates the war going on both in the Actor’s own mind and against the Director. The Director doesn’t want you to choose the “correct” one, he wants you to shoot the “right” one, meaning kill the female. Two mannequins are in front of you, the one on the left a male dressed in a top hat and the one on the right a female. “Choose the right one,” he says as the game hands you a gun. In act one, there’s a point where the Director says that one character must live and one must die. It’s pretty plainly laid out in act one’s decision, but the understanding of how this piece fit into everything didn’t fall into place for me until I finished my third playthrough.
In each of the first four acts, there is a major decision to make, either following the Director’s instruction or going against that voice. The Director acts as society and the pressure of “normalcy” that gets placed on LGBTQ+ people, puppeteering the Actor into staying as James rather than becoming Lily. Lily and James are not brother and sister, but two sides of the same person.
There’s a lot of ambiguity though, and it wasn’t until I finished my third playthrough that the pieces fell into place for me: Layers of Fear 2 is about the mental struggles of someone who is transgender, fighting with not only the outside world’s perception of them, but their own internal identity. At first glance, Layers of Fear 2 seems to be about an actor, James, dealing with demons of his past, including an abusive father and the death of his sister Lily. There’s an important narrative theme in Layers of Fear 2, and it’s layered quite deep, only to be found by the most dedicated of players, and even then, some people may end up missing what it’s about.
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