Genre: Adventure, Horror
Developer: Bloober Team
Publisher: Bloober Team
Platform: PC, Xbox One [reviewed]
Release Date: Aug 30, 2019
Price: $29.99
Blair Witch the video game, not to be confused with the Blair Witch video game, is a video game that is built around the lore and mythology of the original 1999 movie that freaked audiences out until they got to the end of the film, laughed and asked each other “Is that it?” It’s also mostly a dog walking simulator with a tree that had way too much coffee before bed.
Blair Witch is first and foremost a walking simulator
Now Bloober, a studio name probably not well-suited well for horror, brings us a new tale involving the Blair Witch. In the style of the film, you play as a dude lost in the woods with only his flashlight and a found video camera to make sense of the madness. It’s a simple premise but enough there to hold fans of spooky walking simulations that throw the very occasional scare your way, even though the latter is debatable. Hell, Minecraft is huge again on YouTube so why not bring back people fake screaming into their microphones.
But the most interesting thing about Blair Witch is that you aren’t alone in your journey through the woods. On your fantastical quest of mostly boredom, you are accompanied by your dog Bullet, who serves are your mental connection (very poorly I might add) to the real world after you went through some sort of mental and emotional trauma in the recent past. He’s more than your companion as he acts as an extension of the player. Bullet can search out clues, sort of protect you, warn you, and even mess up from time to time.
This leads into the most interesting part of the game as Bullet is a character with some influence over the outcome. How you treat him during the game will affect parts of the later game in various ways. You can reprimand him for messing up or generally being, you know, a dog in the woods, or you can reward him with pets and treats when he does good things. Or you can just be nice to him all the time because I hope you aren’t a psychopath in real life.
I managed to rack up quite the high score on the snake game while waiting for the cold release of death
Blair Witch is first and foremost a walking simulator. I may get a lot of flak for that, but it is what it is. You spend the majority of the game walking through the woods where the Blair Witch resides because you’re a dummy who makes bad decisions. Most of the game is centered around trying to not only get out of the woods you lost yourself in but also trying to unravel the mystery of a missing child that you went in there to look for, and later on some weird time shifting thing where you find out that, well, I won’t spoil things but I screamed at the screen the twist because it was telegraphed pretty hard. It’s neat, even though your character isn’t all that bothered by the madness at times.
There’s a lot of little details that you can uncover just by being a snoop and fiddling about with your equipment. A lot of this can be missed by most players, so those that invest some time into all the nooks and crannies of the world, it’s a pretty fun time. Your cellphone rarely works out in the woods, but it’s full of all sorts of details that help flesh out the player’s character and those around him, and when it does calls and voicemails let you in on bits of backstory. There are text messages to read and a phonebook that you can use to call people who are always busy, except for one annoyed pizza place dude.
There are even two functional games on the old Nokia-style phone to play and waste time while lost in the woods. I managed to rack up quite the high score on the snake game while waiting for the cold release of death. And I’m the sort of person who can appreciate the accurate sounds of the phone and the moving of your thumb to the correct number key when playing. It’s little touches like these that help suck me into the experience, even when it might not be all that deep an experience.
I put Blair Witch in my personal category of headache games. These are games that are designed in such a way to give the player a physical headache in the real world. I’m not talking about the sort of headaches caused by hard puzzles, difficult bosses, or anything like that, because there aren’t any in this game, but from making one motion sick. Because the world is dark and you only have a tiny flashlight, most of the world is going to be dark or slightly out of focus. This means that you are going to be panning your beam of light all around a forest that looks the same, your eyes poorly adjusting as it happens.
This makes sense for a number of reasons: it heightens the tension, makes jump scares easy, and keeps the player a little disorientated at all times. The problem is that also causes motion sickness because your real eyes don’t track the player’s light at quite the same rate. This messes with my equilibrium, especially with any fast motion or movement on the vertical axis. FPS games don’t this to such an extent because the world is well lit, and the night levels still provide ambient light or night vision of some kind. If you are prone to motion sickness this ain’t the game for you. Maybe it’s my monitor, the frame-rate, poor graphics or a combination of all of it, but this was not a fun time.
The problem is that so much of the way, like a walking simulator, is so goddamn boring
Gameplay-wise things are mostly the same as something like Slender: The Arrival, although that game didn’t give me motion sickness for some reason. You walk around the woods uncovering a few clues (there aren’t many) that deepen the story and make you question what is real, what is imagined, and what is actually going the hell on in these sometimes spooky scary woods. But where Blair Witch mixes things up in a really interesting way is in how you use the magic camcorder you find early on in your adventure.
You can use the built-in night-vision to help uncover clues or to see what your feeble human eyes can’t see. But the really cool part is the tapes which you can find scattered around the forest. You can playback the tapes to see clues about what’s been happening, but you also have this strange ability that lets you pause and rewind the tapes and change the world around you like it’s manipulating time. It’s silly, sure, but makes sense in terms of the story later on.
When you find a tape it’s usually of the area you are in, only shot from sometime in the recent past. Finding things that look out of place or items that don’t belong in the tape and pausing on them may bring them into the area you are in in the future or is something happens in the tape you can rewind the world to a point before an incident or event to help you open a new path. It’s a weird system that takes a little bit of time to fully understand but it adds a nice bit of depth to this walking simulator. Maybe you investigate an area and there’s nothing there except for a tape. You watch the tape and see someone using some item and then setting it down or dropping it. You know that wasn’t there so when you pause it on the clue it might then shift into your time where you can then have access to it. It’s cool but it’s also really underutilized as there are only a couple of tapes in the game.
So much of Blair Witch works on the level of the film that it’s based on and as a concept on paper. The spooky scary stuff comes from the world of the film and what you don’t see while the camera mechanics give the game a unique touch. The problem is that so much of the way, like a walking simulator, is so goddamn boring. The forest has paths, but everything at night just looks the same, and I can swear that they simply reused assets all over the place. It’s not a terrible looking game by any means, but it’s not going to impress you on the visual front with the average graphics possibly being a contributor to a lot of the headache issues. It’s hard to make the woods feel spacious and unique, especially in a nighttime setting.
Did I already walk down this path? I probably did and I’m being forced to go in circles by the game until you figure out something, or I might actually be on a new path without any knowledge of it because the game isn’t great at guiding the player as to where it wants you to go. A lot of the times you just sort of wander without any repercussions or scares happening.
The more you see the spooky stuff the less spooky it gets
Good game design can only do so much when you’re walking around a forest at night with limited visibility. I know Blair Witch is trying to create this sense of you actually being lost, but actually being lost fucking sucks. I have a feeling so many players are going to be just wandering around lost until they get bored and put the game down for good pretty early on.
The most scared I got was from the terrible amounts of texture pop-in that was happening the entire game on the Xbox One. Is that a spooky scary down the road ahead? Nope, it was just a tree branch popping in and out of existence, or some rocks deciding it wasn’t the right time to load. Maybe that’s some clue gently flashing down the trail.
Nope, that’s a shrub phasing in and out of our reality or whole segments of an area warping into existence. On more than a few occasion I had gigantic rock formations in the background just poof out of existence as they were trying to load textures in front of my face. One time I was mentioning to a friend watching me how ugly the textures on a rock wall were as the entire formation just disappeared before our eyes.
But what really annoyed was Ellis, the character that you control throughout the game. He’s an idiot. He does everything against rational sense and makes moves that feel stupid. I’ve never yelled at the screen before at my own character. And then when scary or weird things happen that would cripple a person, he just notes that they were weird or seems to ignore what happened entirely.
In movies, this is fun because we don’t have any control and horror movies sort of expect their characters to do stupid things. I should know, it’s the kind of scripts that I write in my real job. But in a video game, this doesn’t work quite as well because you are controlling the character and you feel more connected to the events in the world. You feel as if you have some agency over things.
At one point the Sherrif radios in and ask you to sit still so they can find you because you’ve been missing for hours after being an idiot again. He doesn’t yell at you, demean you, and is incredibly nice, concerned and MAKES PERFECT FUCKING SENSE. And yet even knowing weird shit is going on, that you are wicked lost, and that you aren’t in the best head-space, you ignore him and keep running deeper into the woods. Ellis is stupid even though you don’t want him to be. A story like this in video game form can still work, but in a first-person game where you are Elis and not just controlling him in some over-the-shoulder view, it doesn’t work quite as well.
It’s a simple idea but one that devolves into a game of follow the leader
And I really do think that the developers understood that players wouldn’t really understand the design they were going for. There’s a fine line between reality and a video game. Yes, in real life I might get lost in the woods, stumbling about at random until I died falling down a ravine, but more likely I’d probably just sit down and wait until morning like every stupid safety video ever told me as a kid.
In the game, I need some sort of direction or at least hints that what I’m doing or where I’m going is what the game wants. I need a reason to keep going and being dumb, and some lost kid I don’t know or care about isn’t enough for me. This is where Bullet comes in, to the detriment to the game at times. Miss a scent marker or take a wrong turn and you are going to be wandering around aimlessly until you get bored. When Blair Witch opens up a little to let you fend for yourself is where much of it falls apart.
Blair Witch feels like it was made far too confusing and Bullet was inserted to act as the guide down the linear path the developers were afraid you wouldn’t be able to find otherwise, and sometimes even he isn’t enough. It’s a simple idea but one that devolves into a game of follow the leader. Since you can’t see much at night you’ll be finding a tape, get a clue, have Bullet smell it, and then follow him to the next area with some spooky parts in-between and maybe do some time manipulation.
I wasn’t just being funny when I called Blair Witch a dog walking simulator. To be fair, there wasn’t really any other way to handle this sort of night based game without walking down a locked off path in a straight line. Even with Bullet, you are often wandering around until you get lucky and find something that you usually missed in a video.
And then there’s the fact that Blair Witch follows some really dated tropes of the horror genre. Bullet gets a scent, you follow, Bullet runs into the brush and your flashlight goes out, then some predictable spooky time happens which doesn’t matter or hurt you. Very little came out of left field. Hell, there aren’t even any real jump scares for some cheap laughs. Any logical person is going to see the scare coming and while you will undoubtedly jump, after a few times it becomes the norm. That’s the problem with horror games. After you get scared a few times it loses its punch and the game needs to surprise you in some other way, something Blair Witch never really does.
But what really did it for me was meeting the very first monster, and the only threat, that the game throws your way. Once you score your second tape, Bullet grabs the sent of the missing child you are all searching for and runs deeper into the forest. You get to some head-high brush and your flashlight starts to flicker signaling a spooky scary thing is nearby. And it sure was, the only problem being that Mr. Tree Monster was glitched out and was just stuttering about in the distance.
Blair Witch just isn’t all that impressive even when working right
I first thought this might have been some spooky Silent Hill-style motion, but he was glitched, stuck on the tree he was spawned partly inside. I stood there and laughed and lost all the fear the game had been building up to that point. I could even walk right up behind him without his noticing and figure out how to use annoying Xbox One screen recording function. Then I touched him and he ran away like some Loony Tunes character. Look, when I can’t tell if your monster is glitching or supposed to be shaking like that you got a problem.
And the game went on like this in many segments and it’s made worse when tree guy is the only real baddie. Maybe I just had an unlucky playthrough running into some weird glitches and bugs, but Blair Witch just isn’t all that impressive even when working right. Texture pop-in is a real problem, the draw distance is incredibly poor, and the fear factor the game tries to build is often negated by its own poor design. Gaming publications have been throwing around some incredibly high scores for this title and I just can’t figure out a reason as to why. I don’t want to say that they got paid to be kind, but they probably got paid to be kind. When game publishers pay your rent you might be encouraged to be a little nicer.
But then we get to the combat where the game just gives up the ghost. This is clearly the most underdeveloped portion of the experience and it’s a shame. Whenever you incorporate combat into a horror game you almost always muck things up in some way. Creepy Tourettes tree monster can attack you, setting up a number of issues. Again, seeing the bad guys makes them far less scary, especially when you have some way of fighting back.
Blair Witch won’t let you kill these spooky scaries, but you can push them back by shining your flashlight at them. Bullet will bark in a direction and you point the flashlight wherever he is looking. See baddie, shine baddies, baddie screams, and burns away like a little bitch. If you cant figure this out then you die, but just wake up a little ways back. More often than not you can just sin in a circle until you highlight tree-bread and end his whole career.
This really is the final death-nail for Blair Witch as a horror title. Death isn’t a negative here, rather you just spawn back a little way like you have a number of lives or are part of the Mario family. Your horror experience now feels like a lifeless video game that takes people out of the horror because death is meaningless. Why should I be tense at every turn and at every sound if death isn’t going to ruin my whole afternoon? When death matters you can build tension in fun ways. In most horror games death means your playthrough is over, and while this is annoying, it creates stakes and your tension is valid. You don’t want to die because it’s a full restart thus making the monsters have a serious impact.
Sometimes though, it feels as if parts of the story are weird just for the sake of being weird and not because it makes narrative sense
If I can flash them with some light and yell mean things at them to run away it makes me feel like I have some power over these things, and not dying outright means I have no reason to fear anything. And good luck fighting when you’re in deep brush and can’t even see where Bullet is looking. So, you just sort of end up turning in circles until a spooky sound happens and you take damage until you try again. And with each repeat, the impact is lost to the monster that you’ll be seeing a lot of. I think much of the time fighting with my flashlight I won by total accident or dumb luck. I also suppose you lose a bit of the horror when tense music is blaring, the screen is freaking out, and Bullet is just rubbing his own back in the dirt or taking a piss on a rock.
What’s funny about all this is that I never managed to beat Blair Witch because of how broken the end-game stuff is. At one point you find the “killer” who beats you up and leaves a tape asking you to follow him because reasons. The world gets all foggy and you are forced to use the night vision on a now broken camera to head to the tree from the beginning of the game that you’ve been to a few times because everything is recycled.
I follow the outline of the tree on the camera for what seems like an eternity, not being able to see anything around me. Just when I start to wonder if the game broke down I magically walk through some braches on the ground and right off the edge of a small embankment. Bullet starts floating in the air as I gently slide down until I become stuck in the world. I can only spin around and can’t free myself no matter what I do. This is where the game ended for me because I’m sure as hell not going back and starting the whole dumb experience over again.
Thankfully it’s a pretty short experience if you are lucky enough to finish it at all, which I respect the hell out of. It doesn’t overstay its welcome and flows pretty nicely when you aren’t lost trying to figure out what to do next and when the game isn’t glitching out entirely. The story is interesting if a bit paint-by-numbers at the start, but it does open up and get weird which will be hit or miss for people. It’s a miss for me as I’m more of a “less is more” type person when it comes to horror experiences, but there are people that will dig this. Sometimes though, it feels as if parts of the story are weird just for the sake of being weird and not because it makes narrative sense. Spooky twitchy monsters are neat until you see them again and again. Weird flashback/sideways/forwards are fun until they happen again and again. An object getting all twitchy is a cheap trick and not very scary after you do it once.
True horror is about what you don’t see and how your brain fills in the black. The more you see the spooky stuff the less spooky it gets. Maybe you’ll have a fantastic experience and pee yourself, but after running into my first broken looking monster I was pulled out of the intention the developers wanted for me. But hey, at least the dog petting mechanics are pretty fun.
It’s pretty frightful how broken and not at all scary Blair Witch truly is.
Final Score: 2/5
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