I didn’t like the original Layers of Fear. While some people disagreed—including the original reviewer for this very site—I thought that Bloober Team’s original experience was a mediocre, repetitive experience that was nowhere near as scary as it thought it was.
The DLC expansion for Layers of Fear, entitled Inheritance, interested me a lot more than I thought it would have. While the original game had you play as a deranged painter who was edgier than a teenage My Chemical Romance fan, this time you play as his daughter as she explores the house both before and after the events of the original story, reliving some of her childhood memories.
From the very start you’ll feel much more involved with the protagonist than in the base game. While she is unnamed throughout the whole experience, the character occasionally chimes in with some decent voice lines that allow you to get a feel for her character. This is where Inheritance shines. Whilst the original game felt very detached from its characters and only ever provided details through extremely vague imagery or long text documents, every character from the original game is given a lot more voice time and time to develop, even though the run time for this DLC is much shorter than the base game, two hours at most.
While you may have initially thought of the main game’s protagonist as a cold, psychotic maniac, Inheritance shows him as a father and shows why he eventually lost his mind. Initially, however, he is still shown in his demanding, rage-filled persona which is much more effective and scary from the perspective of a child. It’s later on, during a number of sequences where he becomes more human and understandable and as Bloober Team show this previously frankly unlikable character as a father and as a husband struggling to deal with a wife who is now damaged both physically and mentally that you can start to appreciate the character. Even though he is shown with resentment towards his wife—for reasons I will not spoil—in his desk you’ll find a card for marriage counselling with hastily written handwriting hoping he can make it work. As his daughter says, you’ll never understand him but you can forgive him.
The dreamlike horror sequences are back, however, this time they take place in childhood memories. Much like in Layers of Fear, the majority of scares are of the jump-scare variety but there are a few standout moments that actually had me fully engrossed into the world around me. This is all achieved thanks to the new perspective—that of a child—that Bloober have designed this DLC around. Some sequences look great and even though some aren’t scary at all, they are still visually interesting enough for you to enjoy your time with the DLC.
Performance-wise, Inheritance is better than Layers of Fear by quite a margin, although, frequent frame drops are still a cause for concern. Unlike the original, however, the game won’t randomly chug down into the low teens in a pitch-black hallway for seemingly no reason but for those who are sensitive to performance in games, this is definitely still a problem on the Xbox One.
Summary
Overall, Inheritance is a great piece of DLC for Layers of Fear. While it still does suffer from performance and the studio’s reliance on jump scares, this five-dollar expansion provides a satisfying hour-and-a-half to two-hour experience with the most interesting content that Layers of Fear has to offer.
Lewis is a games journalist, freelance gaming and consumer-tech journalist. They contributed 344 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: has since served as Editor-in-Chief at StealthOptional and Gaming Editor at MSPoweruser, with bylines at Gfinity Esports and FRVR.