Layers of Fears: Portraits of the Wife

These two portraits were created by the digital artist Andrzej Dybowski for Layers of Fears, a first-person psychological horror game released in 2023 by the Polish studio Bloober Team. The game is a reimagining of Layers of Fear (2016) and its sequel, rebuilt in Unreal Engine 5. In the story, a painter becomes obsessed with completing a masterpiece, and the paintings that fill his house shift and decay as the player explores. These portraits depict his wife, his muse, whose disfigurement in a fire is at the heart of the tragedy.

What you are looking at

The two images are shown side by side, like a diptych. Both show the same young woman in the same pose and clothes, in a dark, brownish setting reminiscent of a nineteenth-century oil portrait: half-length, facing us, against a muddy background of reds and dark greens.

On the right, she is recognizably a person. Her dark hair is pulled back and parted in the middle; she wears a gray-brown dress with a scalloped collar and a white silk bow fastened with a red brooch, and a single earring. But the left side of her face is already scarred, the skin around her eye and cheek red and puckered, and the surface of the dress is stained and mottled.

On the left, the damage is complete. Her face and neck are a mass of raw red and black, the features almost erased; the collar is torn away, and the flesh of her chest and arm is burned open. Only the hair, the dress buttons and the pose remain the same.

How it was made

Dybowski paints digitally but imitates the textures of oil on old canvas: craquelure, glazes, dragged brushstrokes and the dark varnish tone of museum portraits. The convincing "old master" surface is essential to the game, where the paintings are objects in the house that change before the player's eyes.

Meaning

The pair works as a before-and-after, or as two states of the same painting. In the game's narrative, the painter cannot accept his wife's changed appearance, and his attempts to paint her become a record of guilt, resentment and grief. The portraits borrow the conventions of family portraiture, meant to preserve a likeness, and turn them into an image of loss. They belong to a long tradition of art about the decaying body, from medieval transi tombs to Van Gogh's smoking skeleton.

Where to see it

The portraits appear in the game and in promotional material and concept art. See also Ghost in the Mirror, our Memento Mori collection and the Andrzej Dybowski page.