Blair Witch, developed by Bloober Games (makers of Layers of Fear), takes place in the same universe as the movie (Blair Witch Project), a couple years after the fact. The game takes place in the Black Hills Forest of Burkittsville, Maryland like the movie. Blair Witch Project is also briefly mentioned in passing during the intro, though no knowledge of the movie is necessary to play. ThisBlair Witch, developed by Bloober Games (makers of Layers of Fear), takes place in the same universe as the movie (Blair Witch Project), a couple years after the fact. The game takes place in the Black Hills Forest of Burkittsville, Maryland like the movie. Blair Witch Project is also briefly mentioned in passing during the intro, though no knowledge of the movie is necessary to play. This is a psychological horror game, with a big emphasis on the ‘psychological’ as the gameplay relies heavily on what’s going on in Ellis’ mind rather than fighting hordes of enemies. It’s about the search and it’s all about what you can’t see in the wide open forest. The best horror is what your own mind conceives rather than what’s shown to you and this game does a very good job at that.
The main character is Ellis, who is suffering from some sort of troubled past, and his faithful dog companion, Bullet. You start off joining the search for a missing boy; the characters are done well to a certain point. The build-up of both plot and character is great but eventually facts start getting thrown at you near the end that you had no way of knowing as they were never mentioned until then.
Most of the gameplay relies on you searching for clues, mostly tapes for your camera, but there are also photos and notes strewn about as well. This is one of the most used gameplay mechanics, as the camera has you watching the tapes to manipulate events and objects to progress the story. Your flashlight is your main tool but as in most horror games, if you keep the brightness level where it tells you, you can barely see anything. Then there was a night-vision mode on the camera but you couldn’t past an arm’s length in front of you (unlike Outlast where you could actually see something). A positive was that neither the flashlight nor the camera required an arduous search for batteries (i.e. every other game that uses these mechanics), they acted like real batteries that could last more than 5 minutes.
The controls for this game are pretty straightforward. There’s a radial menu for the objects you can access along with a menu for different commands you can give to Bullet. The only problem I had was that rewinding the tapes was somewhat clunky and had me attempting to get to the right part several times before it worked.
As for your dog Bullet, he was okay to have around. But many times he was hard to keep track of when you were supposed to use him to find objects, or the trail, or even to sense enemies. And when it got dark in the woods, he was near impossible to see. The collar was supposed to glow in the dark but it didn’t really work. As for giving Bullet commands, which was also the radial wheel, it was a good idea in theory but didn’t play out super well. He was often running off on his own and I had to use the command ‘come here’ a whole lot. Though overall, it was nice to have a companion character in these creepy woods.
For the story, there are two different endings with two smaller side endings and then a ‘secret’ ending. The two different endings are for the actual game and Ellis, one of which you’ll always get unless you read on how to get the second ending because if you mess up even one thing right at the beginning you’re getting the other ending. The two smaller endings have to do with another character and the secret ending can’t even be achieved on the 1st playthrough. This game is meant to be played 2-3 times in order to get the whole thing and I think that that really hurts it in the long run. Playing this game you’ll start to come up with theories as to what’s going on, and for the most part mine were correct but then the game kind of just ends and you’re left really confused. You will have to look up other people’s theories and what they got out of the game to compare and start to piece the whole story together.
Overall, I think this game is worth a playthrough or maybe two if you want to get the other ending. Otherwise, it’s just a good psychological horror game that brings in some P.T. (Silent Hills) elements in the last chapter. P.S. Call the pizza guy every chance you can get a call out, his last calls are hilarious!… Expand
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