izigame.me

If I gave this game 4/10, 3 of the points would be for some of the good things that were kept from the first game. It's remake and The Final Note were the only parts I played and I'll speak only about the former, since I have no interest in seeing how they tarnished the DLC as well or if they made LoF 2 even more mediocre than it already was.
There were some nice new little touches (especially usage of the dolls) and riddles but they get overshadowed by inferior direction of the reused moments compared to it's source material. One of the biggest flaws of the game would be complete forsaking of the subtelty when it comes to the decisions determining our ending, now it's extremely in your face how the game works when it comes to the decision. Another quite frustrating thing would be narrating every single piece of text we pick up, which (just like in LoF 2) ended up destroying the atmosphere and at times sounding even kinda cringy (looking at you Rat Notes).
However none of my complaints could get close anywhere near to how much I hate what they did with the Wife character. Lines upon dying more fitting to some melodramatic chase of lost love, than the vengeful spirit she originally was. The game runs into actually an interesting problem of OVERhumanizing it's character, which is something I've never seen before. Once again, Bloober didn't understand just how much their first game thrived on subtelty and went for very needless direct characterization, which didn't really add anything that wasn't originally there within subtext and notes. And don't even get me started on the chase encounters. Now the Painter might as well be our new favorite paladin, because he can fight the forces of darkness with laser coming out of his lamp. In reality it is an actual fight mechanic, which needless to say is as unfitting to this type of game as it gets. One especially hilarious element of those fight encounters to me were the moments when the Wife just stops and cries on the floor for a while, because (and I'm not making that up) she really sounds as if she were banging with somebody. Peak voice acting. Thank you for making me second guess if I closed all my +18 browser tabs.
The lore sadly also isn't looking too good now. According to one of lines in late game, both Painter and his Wife were cursed since the accident and had "no control over their actions". So not only she wasn't this haunting ghost because of the way she died and how he desecrated her body for art's purpose, the Painter is basically not guilty of anything now since somebody thought it's a good idea to make it into another boring story about fatalistic quasi-possession stories.
I seriously regret spending money on this thing. Layers of Fear 1 is my favorite non-action horror game of all times and it's not close. It's deeply disappointing seeing Bloober not just refuse to learn on their mistakes from their mid sequel but double down on all their mistakes, while adding even worse ones.