Montag, 7. September 2015

Premature Evaluation: Layers of Fear

Though you play an artist in Layers of Fear, most of the art hanging on your walls consists of a repeating number of famous paintings - perhaps the paintings that might pop up if you used the search terms “weirdest renaissance art”. But, eyerolls at the emo curation aside, some of the pieces are really very interesting indeed. Take Rembrandt’s Abduction of Ganymede, for instance (which, okay, in art terms is technically Baroque, but it comes at the very end of the larger social Renaissance that spanned the 14th and 17th centuries). It’s a peculiar piece about the politically charged myth in which Zeus falls in love with Ganymede, a dashing young shepherd and most beautiful of all mortals. As is Zeus’s rapey wont, he tansforms himself into an eagle, and carries Ganymede off to Olympus, where he makes him his cup-bearer. Other services may be inferred - indeed, it was commonly used as an emblem for ancient Greek pederasty and its social acceptance. The likes of Xenophon and Socrates may have asserted that Zeus loved Ganymede for his mind, but homoeroticism has nonetheless clung to the myth. And, for much of the Renaissance, this not-entirely-consenting relationship was presented with little apparent criticism: paintings presented Ganymede as unresisting, indeed, he is ascending to godliness. Zeus does make him immortal after all, so what’s to complain about?

Each week Marsh Davies lets fly at the blank canvas of Early Access and either returns with a masterpiece or ends up rocking back and forth in a corner eating Unity Asset Store crayons. This week he’s played Layers of Fear, a linear boo-scare walk-em-up set in the reassembling spooOOooky house of a maaAAaad painter.

I’m not sure a household needs more than one reproduction of The Abduction of Ganymede. It’s a fine work, sure, but I don’t want to be staring at a pissing toddler’s dangling bum while I’m having dinner, let alone every time I turn a corner in my home. But then, I’m not really sure of a lot of the other decorative choices that my character appears to have made here – the cupboard of black phlegm, the infinite library, the hell mirror, the Erik Satie levitation cellar, the room of bad chairs. Not even Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen would go so far as to daub “ABANDON HOPE WHILE YOU STILL CAN” above a doorway. It doesn’t even make sense, Laurence!

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