Layers of Fear's Steam demo will stimulate your nostrils on May 15

I've been quite confused by Layers of Fear, the latest entry in Bloober Team's wildly successful gothic horror series. I thought it was a straight remake of the not-that-distant 2016 original, given it sports exactly the same name. Yet the developers have been pitching it as the series' "crowning work", which smacks of arrogance for a remake. Having delved into it a little more, I now understand that it's a remake of both Layers of Fear 1 and 2, plus a bunch of extra bits including a newly created chapter designed to wrap up the story.

All of this is landing next month, but if you want to try before you buy, you'll be able to do that in a few days' time. Bloober Team announced that a Steam demo for Layers of Fear will leap out of the closet at you on Monday, May 15. It'll be around for exactly one week, disappearing back into the ether on May 22.

That's not all Bloober Team unveiled either. The studio has also released the game's cinematic intro, which you can watch above. It depicts a woman venturing into a spooky lighthouse while a portentous narration plays over the footage. One of my big questions over Layers of Fear (and, by proxy) Bloober's upcoming remake of Silent Hill 2, is whether the writing will be better than the absolute bilge they offered up in The Medium. Given the opening lines of the trailer are "I once had it all. My palate was sated. Nostrils stimulated" consider me pulling the old Cole Phelps 'doubt' face.

Bloober Team capped off its trio of Layers of Fear announcements with a look at the game's system requirements. Now this is interesting, as the game's one of the first to fully commit to Unreal Engine 5. The full list of requirements are below, but a quick scan of the specs make it seem fairly flexible, with minimum specs mandating a Core i5-4690, a GTX 1060, and 8GB RAM. If you want to experience the game in its full grisly glory, you'll need a Core i7-9700k, a 3080Ti and 6 GB RAM. It also only requires 20 gigs of disk space, which is something of a relief after the monstrous install files of Jedi Survivor and Redfall.

Layers of Fear system requirements — (Image credit: Bloober Team)

The full game is out (again) in June. While I've never been Bloober Team's biggest fan, I did enjoy the first game's knack for rearranging environments behind my back, and I am mildly curious to see it do that with some snazzy new graphics.

Rick has been fascinated by PC gaming since he was seven years old, when he used to sneak into his dad's home office for covert sessions of Doom. He grew up on a diet of similarly unsuitable games, with favourites including Quake, Thief, Half-Life and Deus Ex. Between 2013 and 2022, Rick was games editor of Custom PC magazine and associated website bit-tech.net. But he's always kept one foot in freelance games journalism, writing for publications like Edge, Eurogamer, the Guardian and, naturally, PC Gamer. While he'll play anything that can be controlled with a keyboard and mouse, he has a particular passion for first-person shooters and immersive sims.