Blair Witch Review

The most interesting thing you can find is a cassette tape, which you can slot in your trust camcorder and watch a scene unfold. Pause the scene at the right time and its contents – a spade or something equally as useful to you – will appear in your reality to help you out. These puzzles, if you can call them that, are about as close to gameplay as Blair Witch dares to get, and once you’ve gone “huh, cool” at changing your world once or twice, the novelty wears off.

As the story progresses and the curtain is pulled back on the true nature of the forest, I was disappointed to see the usually ambiguous nature of the woods and the eponymous evil that lurks there to be done a serious disservice. Instead, the Blair Witch game sells a fairly rote story about PTSD that bored me to tears with how many stereotypes and cliches it threw at me in such a short game.

Presentation:

Blair Witch looks the part, but it’s not going to blow anyone away: it’s moving parts – such as the brief glimpses of characters and of course Bullet – are all a little rusty, but the environment looks decent, and manages to capture something of the creepy nature of a quiet woodland that’s hiding its fair share of mysteries. It’s harmed by a choppy framerate however, which can become nauseating in a first person game like this, especially when you’re racing after a dog or away from a threat. There’s also a fair bit of pop-in as well.

The spooky audio cues make an effort where the rest of the game doesn’t, however, and at least unnerved me a couple of times – but even these victories are marred by the fact that they’re all a little stereotypical. A soft, creepy female voice whispering “come to me” might have been scary a decade or two ago in my horror-consuming-history, but now it just feels a little old.

Conclusion:

Despite all of the above – which I realise is a lot of complaints – there is fun to be had in Blair Witch. Indeed, most of the time its a perfectly competent game, but I just never found myself trembling at the prospect of playing more of it (not for the right reasons, anyway.) I would love to have sung this games praises but honestly, it’s all a little dry. I’ve walked these woods before in so many movies and videogames -sometimes those woods are mental asylums, or spooky mansions, or any number of horror tropes – but regardless of which shape they take,  they need to offer something special. Nowadays it feels like it can take a lot to make an impact in what is swiftly becoming a bloated genre full of homogeneous games. Blair Witch deserved something special. This isn’t it.