Layers of Fear was Bloober Team’s final psychological horror game. The studio didn’t advertise this fact, but behind the scenes, a switch flipped weeks ago: When the remastered and expanded Layers of Fear collection came out on June 15th, it marked the end of a phase that was known internally as Bloober Team 2.0.
“This year is like closing the era of making psychological horror games,” studio co-founder Piotr Babieno told Engadget. “Right now we are going into Bloober Team 3.0, making mass-market horror.”
Bloober is not abandoning horror as a whole, but it is shifting focus. Over the past decade, the studio cemented itself as a powerhouse in the realm of psychological horror games, releasing the Layers of Fear franchise, Observer, Blair Witch and The Medium, all of which generated terror through narrative and environmental cues (otherwise known as “vibes”). Because of these design choices, Bloober games have jokingly been called “walking simulators,” a description that Babieno didn’t deny.
“We focused on the story, we focused on the mood, we focused on the quality of graphics and music, but we didn’t put a lot of attention on the gameplay mechanics,” Babieno said. “It wasn’t our target. But we decided that there was a ceiling that we couldn’t break if we did not deliver something fresh, something new.”
Going forward, developers at Bloober will rely on action and player input to generate disquiet, and they hope that this nudge in creative direction will drastically expand the studio’s audience. This mechanics-first ethos was actually implemented internally in 2019, when Bloober began building the remake of Silent Hill 2 for Konami.
“We decided that our next titles should be much more mass-market oriented,” Babieno said. “We’d like to talk with more people. We’d like to deliver our ideas, with our DNA, not by environment or storytelling, but by action. So all of our future titles will have a lot of gameplay mechanics. They will be much bigger.”
Silent Hill 2 will be the public’s first taste of Bloober’s redirection — but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Before considering the implications of fresh design philosophies, let’s take a look at how Bloober Team 2.0 became a major name on the global horror scene in just a few years.
Babieno co-founded the studio that would become Bloober Team in 2008, after selling his marketing research company in Poland. His ultimate goal was to be a storyteller: He initially considered entering the film industry, but it was too expensive, so he pivoted to games. The studio started with around 15 employees, and they focused on building contract games and other quasi-soulless experiences.
“We crafted some smaller titles on our end, but we never were really good,” Babieno said. “We tried to catch everything on the market and we were just following the crowd. And you know, if you’re following trends, if you’re following what’s fashionable, you can’t be good.”
Everything changed for Bloober Team in 2015. Though many of us may have blocked this fact from our memories, Bloober is the studio that built Basement Crawl, the worst-reviewed launch game on PlayStation 4. Basement Crawl was essentially a busted Bomberman clone when it came out in 2014, and it was shredded in reviews, settling at a rating of 27 on Metacritic. However, since it was one of just a few games to launch alongside the PS4, it sold well enough. Bloober tried to make things right by releasing Brawl in 2015, a free game that addressed many of the complaints players had with Basement Crawl.
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