Bloober Team Completes Production of Psychological Horror Games

Bloober Team’s latest release, the remastered and expanded Layers of Fear collection, quietly signaled the conclusion of their era known as Bloober Team 2.0. This psychological horror game, which was not openly promoted as their final project, marked the end of this phase for the studio.

“This year is like closing an era of making psychological horror games,” studio founder Piotr Babieno told ReturnByte. “Right now we’re transitioning to Bloober Team 3.0 and making mass market horror.”

Bloober doesn’t abandon horror as a whole, but it shifts the focus. Over the last decade, the studio established itself as a powerhouse in psychological horror, releasing the Layers of Fear series, Observer, Blair Witch, and The Medium, all of which instilled terror through narrative and environmental cues (also known as “atmospheres”). Because of these design choices, Bloober games are playfully called “walking simulators”, which Babieno did not dispute.

“We focused on the story, we focused on the atmosphere, we focused on the quality of the graphics and music, but we didn’t pay much attention to the game mechanics,” Babieno said. “That wasn’t our goal. But we decided there’s a ceiling we can’t break if we don’t deliver something fresh, something new.”

Going forward, Bloober’s developers will rely on action and player input to create a sense of unease, and they hope this nudge in a creative direction will significantly expand the studio’s audience. This mechanics-first ethos was actually implemented internally in 2019 when Bloober began building the Silent Hill 2 remake for Konami.

“We decided that the next titles should be much more mass-market oriented,” Babieno said. “We’d like to talk to more people. We want to deliver our ideas with our DNA, not through environment or storytelling, but through action. So all our future games will have a lot of game mechanics. They’ll be much bigger.”

Silent Hill 2 is the public’s first taste of Bloober’s remake – but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Before we consider the implications of the fresh design philosophy, 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 became Bloober Team in 2006 after selling his marketing research company in Poland. His ultimate goal was to be a storyteller: he initially considered going into the film industry, but it was too expensive, so he switched to games. The studio started with about 15 employees, focused on building contract games and other almost soulless experiences.

“We developed some smaller titles, but we were never really good,” Babieno said. “We tried to catch everything on the market and just followed the audience. And you know if you follow trends or fashion, you can’t be good.”

Everything changed for Bloober Team in 2015. Although many of us may have blocked this fact from our memories, Bloober is the studio that built Basement Crawl, the worst-rated PlayStation 4 launch game. Basement Crawl was basically a cracked Bomberman clone. came out in 2014 and was crushed by reviews, with a Metacritic score of 27. However, being one of the few games to launch alongside the PS4, it sold well enough. Bloober tried to fix things by releasing Brawl in 2015, a free-to-play game that addressed many player complaints about Basement Crawl.

After the release of Brawl, Bloober was forced into an internal reckoning. Babieno sat down with his team and had a candid discussion about the studio’s identity and future.

“It seems like we still don’t know how to make something good, and we have a game that has a 27 percent on Metacritic, so maybe we should change,” Babieno recalled thinking. “Our decision was, OK, we have to focus on creating something we’re proud of. That’s why we went back to our roots and decided we wanted to deliver horror games.”

Horror has a special, blood-soaked place in Babieno’s heart. He grew up devouring books, movies, and games with unsettling themes, including the works of Stephen King, Graham Masterton, and Konami’s Silent Hill team. Fear spoke to him, and as a creator he saw how it served as a shortcut to deep human emotions and universal experiences.

Babieno took his team’s plan to his investors and laid it all out: “We sat down with the financiers and told them we need money, but we have a pretty good idea for the next 10 years. We’d like to become one of the really good psychological horror game developers.” The investors said yes. Bloober Team 2.0 was born.

Layers of Fear was released in 2016 and was a breakout hit, followed by a succession of well-received psychological horror titles including Observer and Blair Witch. But that was only the public side of things: as Bloober rebranded and established itself as a pillar of psychological horror, Babieno secretly tried to convince Konami to let Bloober make a Silent Hill game.

Babieno first approached Konami in 2015 proposing a Silent Hill spin-off game, something entirely new to the series. The conversation continued for four years, and finally in 2019 Konami invited Babieno to Japan for a meeting.

“Almost the entire board came to the meeting, and they asked us to prepare a pitch for a Silent Hill 2 remake,” Babieno said. “And ugh. We were so afraid to touch it. We understood from the first day of the conversation that we have half the world that loves us and half the world that hates us. We are touching something sacred.”

Other studios were in the running to handle Konami’s secret Silent Hill 2 remake, but Bloober got the gig. Konami officially announced in October 2022.

Which brings us back to today. The studio just released Layers of Fear, a complete series remaster in Unreal Engine 5. With this collection, it closes the door early on the 10-year plan it laid out for Bloober 2.0 in 2015. The hard turn worked well for Bloober once before; it makes sense to try it again.

Silent Hill 2 is the first title from Bloober Team 3.0, the studio’s focus on action-first, mass-market horror games. This is a small but significant change in Babieno’s direction, but he – and Bloober as a whole – is still obsessed with fear.

“We are in a very special history because we have a lot of crises,” Babieno said. He described horror games as a kind of catharsis for everyday catharsis, a safe place where people can analyze their own reactions to powerful stimuli and consider real-world emotions. He mentioned the spreading threat of climate change and global economic crises; he noted that Bloober is based in Poland, which has a front-row seat to the carnage of the Ukrainian war.

He continued: “As humans, we would like to be ready for something unexpected. Those fears are all around us… We would like to offer games that allow us to deal with our fears.”

Meanwhile, Bloober Team has grown to around 230 employees, and one of Babieno’s biggest personal fears is letting them down or being fired. As of 2023, Bloober will have no layoffs; In the past three years, he said, only five people have left the company. Babieno isn’t actively growing Bloober right now, and he’s not looking for a buyer, even though the industry’s biggest publishers are snapping up talented indie studios left and right. From Babieno’s point of view, Bloober works best as an independent company building AAA-quality games – horror games, to be exact.

“I would like to remain independent because only then can we do something new, something fresh and creative,” he said. “I don’t want to create games by looking at an Excel spreadsheet. I want to offer new horror milestones, our niche.”