Systems: Xbox One, Windows, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Oculus Quest 1 & 2, Amazon Luna
Release Date: August 30, 2019
Play Time: 5 - 10 Hours
[I have had a fair amount of trouble writing this article, possibly because I did not sit down and write it right after finishing the game, but also because I have sat down many times to write about different aspects of the game that at times I feel like I use an inconsistent voice throughout. Last week, I came to the realization that another reason/excuse is that Bloober Team tried to fit so many different mechanics and features into a game that can be beaten in 5 - 10 hours, that they were not able to really make something special, or at least as special as I wanted it to be. And as I continued to bring up different mechanics in the game, I realized that this article was getting longer and longer without covering as much as I felt I wanted to. So we will see how well we do with the time and space that is given to us].
I would like to think that I have a good relationship with games from Bloober Team having played Layers of Fears on PC and Switch, as well as >observer_ on the Switch as well (I should really finish and publish that article). I also briefly started Layers of Fear 2 on my laptop just to see if I could run it although I am thinking that I may just pick it up on the Switch for portability reasons.
Adding more to the context pile, I am a fan of the lore of The Blair Witch Project, or at least of the first movie. I never saw Book of Shadows probably because of how bad the reviews for the film were, and Conklederp and I did see Blair Witch back in 2016 and while there were elements that I liked about the movie, overall I did not think it was as good as the first film. I have never read any of the books or the comics, nor have I watched any of the documentary TV specials. I did like that Lionsgate has said that the story in this game is considered canon in the world of The Blair Witch, so that added a bit of legitimacy, although I did not need that to want to play the game.
So the basic gist of Blair Witch is that you play the character of Ellis Lynch, a former (disgraced) police officer and veteran of the first gulf war (Operation Desert Storm) who is assisting with the search of the missing boy Peter Shannon who went missing in the Black Hills Forest outside of Burkittsville, Maryland. Ellis decides to help out and brings along with his German Shepherd Bullet, and heads out to meet up with the organizing search party when the game starts.
I will be honest, after playing Call of Cthulhu, I was a little disappointed in how much Blair Witch looked like it had been downgraded to run on the Switch. I bring up Call of Cthulhu specifically because that was the game I had just finished, and that is the only reason as the games did not use the same engine or the same company to port the game to the Switch. As mentioned above, I thought that the port of Layers of Fears looked great on the Switch, but I recognize that one game takes place within the claustrophobic walls of a house that is changing as you pass through doors that close and lock immediately behind you, and this game takes place primarily outside in a forest with a bit longer draw distance so the need to render more of the environment takes a bit more processing power (see, I can sound like I know what I am talking about). But anyway, I was a little disappointed in the environment and how flat a lot of the foliage looked, how much your companion animal Bullet stood out from the rest of the environment, and how he would frequently clip through objects like tables, walls, and doors.
I feel like there was too much bloat in the game, specifically the backstory for our main character and former police officer Ellis Lynch. From the onset of the game, hints are dropped about Ellis that there is more going on than him wanting to help out with the search for a missing kid in the woods outside of Burkittsville, MD. There is history with himself and the police chief conducting the search, his wife Jess, and a special connection to his dog Bullet which the game tells you can have a negative psychological impact on Ellis if Bullet gets too far away. And this is all on top of who the kid that went missing is and the circumstances under how and why they went missing. I feel like this story could work as an episodic mini-series, but as a stand-alone video game, there is a lot of ground to cover in a six to eight-hour survival horror game. Now that I said it out loud, I still do not think that this story would work well as a mini-series because again, there was too much bloat for Ellis' story and too many things that happened to him in the way that he was affected by the woods and the Blair Witch that had not been established. This is on top of feeling frustrated at times by the puzzles needing to progress to new areas as well as just getting lost in a forest.
Let us talk about getting lost first because while at times it felt genuine that you could get turned around in a forest without any landmarks, that should not be something to strive for in a video game. In the opening area, after walking down a path then hopping down an embankment that you cannot climb back up, I found myself in an area that I could not get out of. I circled the entire perimeter expecting to find a path leading out of the area, but there was none. I explored the interior of the area, coming across a small pond and what looked like a small camp from a houseless person, but nothing pointed me in the right direction. I honestly do not remember what it was, I think it might have been something I saw on the ground and had Bullet interact with because Bullet then sprinted off, and only upon following Bullet were you able to leave. Conklederp can attest to my frustration my first time playing not finding my way out of this area, turning the game off, then starting it back up the next night only to find that I started back at the embankment, which honestly I felt a bit better in retrospect because it allowed me to search the area from the beginning in case I missed anything. I got lost again. But I did find whatever it was that I found that triggered Bullet to sprint off into the woods eventually.
Throughout the game, you could also find collectible objects that only seemed to offer flavor to the world and had no noticeable impact on the rest of the game. You can first find a wooden totem in a nearly unrecognizable shape, almost like it is trying to be something that Ellis and the player should be able to recognize but it is not quite there as far as detail and context go. You also find polaroids of various people along with their names written on the back. I felt like it was implied that these were people who had gone missing, possibly also victims of Carver's kidnapping, but the photos are the only evidence of these people as you do not find jackets, boots, or a bundled-up cloth full of bloodied teeth lying around. The other collectible was possible only in Ellis' head as you can pick up dog tags that really get to Ellis. I do not recall if he says much of anything about specific dog tags that are picked up other than questioning why they are there. I am sure that on other systems that finding all or a certain number of these leads to an achievement, but on the Switch, it was just something to momentarily interact with while trying not to stay lost. It did make me feel self-conscious about how much of the game I was missing if I felt that I was missing a slew of collectibles because I did not go and look behind that one tree or under those boulders off to the side of the map.
Most of the puzzles in the game not associated with the video camera felt fine and appropriate for the world, or at least the physical puzzles. There was one spread over multiple areas of an entire mining camp which was actually pretty annoying, where you had to repair a steam engine with missing parts that were scattered about. The solution to the puzzle was fine and how you used the video camera was nice, but finding all of the pieces was a pain, especially the last piece (I do not remember specifically what it was, but it does not particularly matter). This last piece was located in the back of a shack that was only accessible to Bullet, but you had to spot it through a broken window and tell Bullet to get the thing. Most of the time, if you were within a certain proximity to an object on the ground, there would be a high contrast white icon that hovered over the object drawing your eye to something on the ground. For this object, you had to be close to the building and look in the direction of the window to see the icon. Taking this into account along with nothing specifically indicating that there was anything in this inaccessible part of the shack, meant I had to look at two different walkthroughs to figure out what I needed and where it was located.
The bloat story-wise has everything to do with Ellis' backstory and the trauma he suffered while serving in Iraq. There were multiple times when Ellis would start having visual hallucinations where the surrounding forest would take on the environment of any number of different locations, such as building interiors, outside burning buildings in a stereotypical 'war-time-middle-east-desert-city' skin, or even running along a sand-covered deserted freeway. I realize that in the films, because everything is found footage, you cannot film what someone is hallucinating and what the cause of those hallucinations are. Are they caused by the Blair Witch? Are they caused by the trauma that a character has suffered in the past and being lost in the woods is triggering that trauma? There is an additional backstory between Ellis and his girlfriend/wife who crops up as someone who he talks to occasionally on his cellphone as someone who is worried about him personally as well as his mental state. And then there is the evolving story of the hermit Carver who is first introduced through a found mini-VHS tape to be the one responsible for the disappearance and alleged kidnapping of Peter Shannon. I just felt that there was too much going on for any one of these stories to really have a serious impact. Sure they are there to help flesh out Ellis' character and to give them more than one dimension and I think if Bloober Team had stuck with the girlfriend/wife angle and sprinkled hallucinations here and there instead of focusing so much on entire areas of the forest completely becoming new locations that were new to the player (but not new to the character) then, I don't know, the story would not have felt like there was so much to it that I was supposed to follow that I really did not feel attached to.
The final act of the game finally brings you to the Witch's Cabin and honestly by this point in the game, I was glad that the story was coming to a close. I was also relieved that I was going to be playing in another indoor location because those areas like the wood mill and the buildings that you went into in the camps felt more tense than the open forested areas and kept me on edge. I was a little worried that the interiors of the Witch's Cabin were going to feel like Layers of Fear, with looping hallways full of jumpscares, paintings flying off walls and melting into horrific visages, as I did not want a copy of that game. I think I wanted something tangentially similar, taking a similar approach to make an indoor location scary and tense, not knowing what is going to be around the next corner, but keeping the flavor of the world of The Blair Witch.
Once inside, it did not feel like a retread of Layers of Fear (or even Outlast to a lesser extent with the inclusion of the camcorder) as there was some environmental puzzle-solving such as using the camera to follow paths along the floor while avoiding looking at whatever it was that you were not supposed to look at. There was one instance of finding and using a red mini-VHS tape to get through a collapsed hallway, and then it was primarily wandering through the house and basement hoping that nothing was going to jump out at you. Like the mansion in Layers of Fears, there was a fair amount of passing through hallways while upstairs only to find yourself back at the front entryway on the first floor, so cyclical rooms that do not make sense. In this setting though, there was a different creepiness to it than in Layers of Fears because here there was an added layer of frustration of constantly being redirected when all you are trying to do is find Peter.
But the Witches Cabin was not without its share of issues. Because this was the climax of the game, a lot of Ellis' backstory involving his military service in Iraq and his relationships came to a head. At times passing from one room into another would lead Ellis through a memory reenacted that felt like I was being pulled from one story to another. The anxiety that I was feeling from trying to find my way through a house that was purposefully misdirecting me was put on hold as I found myself wandering through a hallucination about Ellis' squad and what happened to them. Maybe this was meant as a respite from the Witch's Cabin, but at the same time, it felt a bit like a distraction. Really, the main hiccups inside the Witch's Cabin were just another extension of the rest of the game, trying to cover too much information and bring together too many story points while all trying to wrap up the whole missing person aspect of the game.
After finishing the game, I was a little confused by the ending so I looked up information and found out that there are multiple endings. Naturally, I ended up with the bad ending, but after finding out what you had to do for the good ending, I was a little annoyed because it required the player to go against mechanics that the game had taught the player throughout the first two acts as what you needed to do to survive against antagonistic elements. Without spoiling anything, it would be like in Super Mario Bros., how you can take out the bridge in the castle stage by jumping on the axe if you don't fireball the faux Bowser, but then in 8-4 when you finally get to the correct castle and actually do go up against Bowser, that you completely avoid him and jump over the axe to receive the good ending. It almost felt like there was supposed to be a setup to get the player to replay the game, to redo events in order to earn the good ending, but from what I read, only events that occur (or don't occur) while in the Witch's Cabin directly affect the ending, and once you finish the game, you cannot restart from a previous save state, at least on the Switch. And I was not about to restart the game again.
I very much have mixed feelings about Blair Witch. I enjoyed some of the story points and again, I think it could have worked better if this had been an episodic game or even a third-person survival adventure/horror game instead of a first-person survival horror. As for scariness, there were a couple of times, for the majority of the game where I felt tense, but most of the time the tension was broken by being lost; again, coming back to being lost as an out-of-game frustration. Towards the middle of the game, you start going into buildings like the aforementioned mining camp, the abandoned summer camp, later a mill, and finally the Blair Witch House. The indoor locations were definitely the highlights of the game for me as I felt that the whole getting lost mechanic in the forest felt more like I was doing something wrong and not a feature. And sometimes, as with my first attempt playing, it was me after all.
P.S. While writing this article, I found that I kept adding snippets of things I wanted to talk about, be it game mechanics, or just short sections of the game that ended up not fitting with anything else that I was talking about. Some of those include fighting off shadowy figures with your flashlight and what those figures were and where they came from. Or even their purpose besides being antagonistic towards Ellis. Then there was how your dog Bullet was used within the game, and then at times how the dog needed to be close to Ellis and how at times that was in conflict with their surroundings more than a few times. There was also the handling of the missing kid Peter, and even the character of Carver, who seemed like a stand-in antagonist for the Witch because you could not have an omnipresent villain who shouldn't show up at all based on the two Blair Witch movies that I saw. Again, this all goes back to my feeling that there were a lot of good ideas going into The Blair Witch, and they all made it into the game, but there was not a lot of thought on how those individual elements should be used to create a cohesive narrative in a 5-10 hour time span.
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