I'm lost without Bullet, my canine companion in Bloober Team's Blair Witch. Not in an existential sense, I mean I have no idea where to go without Bullet telling me. The paths through the woods loop round on the themselves, sending you in circles. Often the route I need to take is through a screen of bushes I couldn't tell you could pass through. The real path to follow is wherever Bullet leads.
Set in 1996, three years before the original Blair Witch film released, you play Ellis an ex-military, ex-cop, ex-boyfriend who is trying to find a missing boy before they become ex-alive. Not officially, mind. The police haven't asked for his help in the search and they're not exactly thrilled to learn that he's gone into the woods alone without asking them first. After all, you're an ex-cop and it doesn't sound like you resigned.
Much like Bloober Team's previous horror game Layers of Fear and other creepy games like the Amnesia series, in Blair Witch you're largely powerless. You can walk freely in environments, but you're unarmed. Your role is to find clues, read documents, and be unsettled by the things you see creeping around on the edge of your vision.
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You do, however, have one special power. In the wild woods you'll find discarded camcorder tapes - look, it's just as believable as finding sequential pages of a diary that have scattered around a house. Is the diary writer just stopping to write an entry and then throwing it over their shoulder? - which you can play back on a camera you find. You can alter the world around you by pausing the tape at the right moment. For instance, in one tape you see someone following the missing boy, Peter Shannon. Peter drops a baseball which his captor notices and picks up. If you pause the video when the ball is still on the floor then it appears in the game world for you to find and give to Bullet to follow the scent.
The camcorder puzzles never get as complex as the they could - with you having to scrub back and forward to navigate a room full of traps, for instance - but it is an effective mechanic, and one I'd like to see more of. Other puzzles are more grounded in reality, with you rearranging fuses to turn on a car's headlights and reassembling a steam lift. Again, these puzzles were a welcome relief from wandering the forest but there were too few of them and they were too simple.
Your character, Ellis, is clearly struggling with a profound case of PTSD. As you wander the woods you'll step into hallucinatory visions of his time in the military. At first they're slight things, you'll be running in the woods and hear the crack and whizz of a bullet passing by your head, but soon you're being chased by imaginary helicopters and ducking between phantom mortar blasts.
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The puzzles and hallucinations can only distract for so long, though. The more I played of the Blair Witch the more pedestrian I found it. You're always following in the Blair Witch. Either the wagging tale of your dog as it tracks a scent or looking for ethereal markings using night vision mode on your camcorder. By the end of the game I realise I'm not even taking in the world around me as I just tunnel-vision on the path markers that guide me. There's not enough in the woods to invite exploration and the shifting geography and hidden pathways actively work against you finding anything for yourself. It's simply easier to rely on Bullet or your camera, otherwise I find myself walking in circles.
This is especially true of the game's final section, in the abandoned house that features in many of the films. The shifting corridors mean that you often find yourself going through a door and ending up back in a room your explored earlier. This should be unsettling but because you spend so long in the house and the same trick is pulled so frequently, it becomes an extremely dull part of the game.
When I played Blair Witch at a demo event, I was presented with a cut down version of the game. I played sections from each area of the story and I came away excited to play the entire journey through the wood. It turns out that edited version of the game showed it in the best light. It only gave you moments when you were active, when you were being hunted, when you were calling your ex, Jess, on the phone. When you play the full adventure, the extensive downtime between activity works against the tension the game needs to build, I find any sense of horror dissipates between scares.
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Blair Witch promised to be a tie-in game that captured the spirit of the original film, translating the fear of being trapped and lost in a vast wood while something hunts you from film to a game. Unfortunately, while it has moments of engaging activity, and lovely dog to help you on your way, because it overstays its welcome, particularly in the final section, when the credits rolled I was left frustrated, not fearful.
Score: 5/10
Featured Image Credit: Bloober Team