(Ellis’ life has been a grueling cavalcade of bloody, guilt-inducing screwups, and the Blair Witch is ready to drag him - and you - through all of them.) There’s one great exception: I filled a crucial gap in the plot by receiving an enigmatic text message about a padlock in the game that I could no longer access, then remembering the combination on a second playthrough. As other reviews have noted, the game was also nerve-wrackingly buggy when I played it, forcing me to restart from a stingy fixed-checkpoint system after getting stuck in bushes or paralyzed midway through animations.īlair Witch’s story isn’t bad, but it was barely compelling enough to pull me through once, let alone twice. ![]() Its first act holds up to this well, but I found myself dreading the last section, which is a slog of surrealist corridors interspersed with unnecessary exposition. And I just couldn’t make it through again.īlair Witch isn’t a very long game - I finished it in around five hours - and it seems designed to be played multiple times. But I restarted Blair Witch almost the moment I finished it, determined to change an abrupt and unsatisfying fate that I wasn’t quite sure how I’d chosen. A few moments look like choice points, including one genuinely heartstring-tugging sequence. The game repeatedly warns you that it’s watching your actions, including how you treat Bullet, and that it will adapt accordingly. It’s hard for me to tell how many of Blair Witch’s mechanics actually matter, since their effects aren’t clear after one playthrough. ‘Blair Witch’ begs you to play it more than once, but it can also be a slogĪt least. Then, as you learn more about the forest and the Blair Witch, the game turns this tendency against you, suggesting that you’ve voluntarily doomed yourself. And it encourages a kind of learned helplessness in which you’ll do almost anything the game asks you to do - even if it’s optional - in hopes that it will move you forward. It’s very effectively disorienting, mirroring Ellis’ building confusion and panic. You wander from one to another by solving a simple puzzle finding an object that sends Bullet dashing through a previously inaccessible gap or walking along some hallucinatory woodland Möbius strip until the Blair Witch decides you’ve suffered enough. They’re eerie, circular arenas governed by uncanny dream logic. Its levels don’t offer any illusion of purpose or coherence. It’s a clever idea that’s used in versatile ways, and it’s later joined by surprisingly decent camera-based stealth sequences.īut Blair Witch also emphasizes that you’re helplessly lost in this forest. You can find tapes around the forest and scrub through them to change the state of the world - a closed door might open at a certain point in a video, for example, or a child’s toy might be dropped on the ground. You can even play little video games on the phone.Īnd The Blair Witch Project’s found-footage tradition survives in the form of supernatural camcorder puzzles. You can call people (primarily your ex-wife and, weirdly enough, a pizza parlor) on a cellphone, but only at specific points where you have a signal. There are flashlight-based combat sections that work surprisingly well - they’re like twitch-reflex hidden object games, as you try to follow the movement of shadowy creatures and shine a light to ward them off. Bullet is a major gameplay system as well as a very good boy: he’ll seek out important items, follow scent trails, and respond if you pet or reprimand him. In one sense, the game gives players a surprising array of mechanics. Your protagonist Ellis has joined the search party with his dog Bullet, although nobody wants him there - for reasons that are both highly enigmatic and eminently understandable, since as Polygon’s Cass Marshall has noted, Ellis is a real jerk.ĭoes petting the dog matter? I don’t know, but it feels good In Blair Witch, a child has gone missing in the woods. It’s set in Maryland’s Burkittsville Woods (home to the eponymous Blair Witch) in 1996, shortly after the disappearance of three hapless campers in the original film. I also never want to see it again.īlair Witch was released last week by the Polish studio Bloober Team, best known for cyberpunk detective game Observer and the Layers of Fear series. I want to play Blair Witch over and over. It’s a fitting, fascinating, yet often self-defeating idea. Blair Witch, a game set in the same world as iconic horror film The Blair Witch Project, makes the illusion explicit - then promises you ways to exploit it. There are lots of video games based on the illusion of choice, full of spaces designed to invisibly nudge players toward a goal.
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