When Bloober Team announced Blair Witch on-stage at Microsoft’s presser at E3, you could tell the audience was taken aback. It’s a fairly unexpected reveal, especially given the last game in the series released way back in 2000.
20 years after the ground-breaking movie tidied up at the box office, Lionsgate wanted to bring the franchise back. The last film in the series was released in 2016 to mixed acclaim, but that’s not inhibited Bloober and its creative developers from making something wholly unique… both in the Blair Witch universe and in the horror games space.
Blair Witch, after all, dragged the ‘found footage’ genre kicking and screaming to the mainstream movie audience – Bloober, in the studio’s own words, wants to pay homage to that.
Coming off the back of sci-fi thriller Observer and neo-horror masterclass Layers of Fear, Bloober has proved its got the genre knowledge to pull off a game in a series like Blair Witch. It’s about insanity, it’s about self-doubt, it’s about getting under your skin so much that you – the player – won’t know if you’re losing your mind or if the game’s having its intended effect on you.
Set in 1996, Blair Witch casts you as Ellis: ex-military, ex-cop and troubled. You need to rescue a young boy, Peter Shannon, that’s gone missing in the woods. Those woods. Standard horror fare so far, right? Sort of.
Enter Bullet. He’s your loyal dog companion – a good boy German Shepherd with some pretty advanced AI and a resistance to the occult phenomena that permeates these woods.
There are five different chapters in the game, and the deeper you get into the forest, the more you’re going to rely on Bullet.
The UI in the title is relatively barebones, as games go. Most of the game revolves around lo-fi 90s tech: night-vision is achieved via infrared on a handheld recorder (making you feel incredibly unsafe when you’re moving around a dark area with your face pressed close to the glass, begging not to see something scary) and other characters can call you via an old Nokia-looking mobile phone.
Pressing a button will call up the ‘Bullet Wheel’ where you can issue orders to the loyal mutt. Heel, Sit, Stay Close, Pet – what you’d expect from a dog interaction chart. But the usage of those commands is down entirely to the player… you could probably get away with playing the whole game without interacting with Bullet (but you’d have to be pretty heartless).
“There are no moments where we say ‘you have to make Bullet do this’” explains Glomb. “Whatever you choose to cooperate with him, that’s up to him. He has his own AI – he might fetch things for you, he might get scared and bark, he might try and point you towards an item of interest.”
The development team told us that ‘prolonged loneliness can really affect your mental state’ in the game, meaning that if you don’t do enough to keep Bullet around as the Witch starts to really get in your head, he might scarper and leave you to deal with whatever the hell is going on in the woods.
It’s a smart way of almost forcing a player to have an emotional reaction to a companion – to admit their own weakness and vulnerability and place it in an AI companion that can’t even really respond to you clearly.
It makes the game a far more insidious experience than we were expecting, and we found ourselves more or less glued to Bullet’s side as we played. We tried to calm him down when he got upset, we praised him when he bought us an item of interest, and he broke our hearts when a creature in the woods startled him and he disappeared as we run through the woods, flashlight fading to a dim glow and we heard him bark in the distance.
Blair Witch doesn’t rely on gore, blood or jump scares to get in your head. It’s better than that. The atmosphere, the gruelling build-up of tension… that’s what’s designed to scare you. Bullet is an extension of Bloober Team’s boundary-pushing work in the interactive psychological horror genre, and a mechanic that fuses narrative storytelling with emergent, player-driven activity. A perfect mix for a horror game.
The setup might be simple – search the woods, find the boy – but as you start to uncover more about Ellis and his past, his trauma and his connection to the world, the more you start to realise this game goes far beyond the immediate story.
It’s a masterclass in world-building, a tribute to Blair Witch lore, a thoughtful and provocative appreciation of what’s come before whilst filling out gaps in the wider Blair Witch universe.
Layers of Fear established Bloober as one of the psychological horror studios. Observer proved it can weave a narrative as satisfying as any screenwriter or novelist. Layers of Fear 2 combined the two.
Now, with Blair Witch, we’re seeing Bloober confidently take on one of the biggest names in all of horror… and deliver a project worthy of the original.
Blair Witch releases on 30th August 2019 for Xbox One and PC (and it'll be coming to Xbox Games Pass on release date).
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