Featured Image Credit: Konami
Topics: Indie Games, Silent Hill
Silent Hill 2 developer Bloober Team has announced its new game after weeks of anticipation, and it’s not quite what everyone expected.
Last month, Bloober Team teased that an announcement for an unannounced project was going to be made in February.
This was revealed with a countdown timer that was slowly ticking down to 14 February along with the quote: “Some things never leave the walls. They only learn to wait”.
Along with this came an audible excerpt of a poem, William Blake’s The Sick Rose, where an ominous voice read out: “Thou art sick... invisible flies in the night… Howling storm has found out thy bed of crimson joy... Dark secret thy life destroy.”
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Given the references to roses, fans theorised that Bloober Team was prepping to announce a remake or sequel to Rule of Rose, a PS2-era horror game which has become one of the rarest games of that generation.
Now that 14 February has come and gone, Bloober Team announced that one of its next projects is Layers of Fear 3, the third game in the series and probably the company’s most famous original IP.
The trailer for Layers of Fear 3 features a man sitting in a rather creepy mansion room, reading Blake’s poem to the view of a woman in a portrait, presumably the “sick rose” referenced in the poem.
Given the poem’s prominence to the game’s early marketing, it’s safe to say that an analysis of The Sick Rose could lead to hints about what Layers of Fear 3’s plot could involve.
On surface-level, the 18th century poem is about a rose flower which dies as it is eaten by a worm.
Thinking about it in an abstract sense though, there are more sexual connotations. It may actually refer to a woman’s innocence, which is “destroyed” by the worm. The worm, in this case, being a metaphor for a man.
It feels like this may become the basis for whatever story Layers of Fear 3 is telling. Either that, or Bloober just wanted to get creepy with the marketing. Well, mission accomplished I’d say.
There’s no release date or confirmed platforms for Layers of Fear 3 yet, but I imagine Bloober is still busy with Project M and the Silent Hill 1 remake, the former of which is due to release later this year.