The Director wants you to just go with the flow and move backwards with the direction of the water. The final choice is a flooded hallway, a rising tide pushing you backwards. The father only having one eye struck me as symbolism for the myopic and single-sighted way in which he viewed his son, unwilling to accept the female identity of his child. We’re also introduced to the father in the third act, a one-eyed cyclops of a beast that the game insinuates abused James as a child. “Following her direction” is literally choosing the female side, which leads to that particular ending. Given that the third act is all about the Actor’s childhood life, it makes sense that this one focuses a lot more on personal and familial conflicts rather than overtones of broader societal expectations. Choosing to follow her direction is the one that rebels against the Director for the sake of the endings, and choosing to follow his direction is seen as going along with the Director. In the third act, the trophies ask you to “follow her direction” or “follow his direction.” The decision here is less about the Director and more related to the internal conflict between the Actor’s male and female identities. If you do take the food from the dog, the Director angrily comments on this, mad that you are fighting back. These choices mirror the struggles of transgendered individuals fighting every day for their survival. If you do give up here, voice over from Lily laments that you didn’t take what you needed to survive, that you just laid down and gave up. The gameplay prompts to fight for survival are more difficult to follow, and the game tries to make you feel bad for taking food from a dog. 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.

Layers of fear trophy guide