Review for Blair Witch. Game for PC and Xbox One, the video game was released on 30/08/2019
Development studio Bloober Team, which worked on the likes of Layers Of Fear and Observer, returns with a new horror game Blair Witch. The title is one of the most evocative scenarios of terror of the last twenty years. Blair Witch is inspired by the famous film The Blair Witch Project, a film appreciated both by the public and by critics and which has given a strong impetus to the mockumentary genre, as well as having created a real mythology.
The player is totally immersed in the bleak and vast forest of Black Hills, Maryland. It is a truly existing forest, in the vicinity of which is the town of Burkittsville, which has just over one hundred and fifty souls. The whole story of the Blair witch is based on a fact that happened in 1785, two years after the end of the American War of Independence. At that time a girl was accused of kidnapping local children to deprive them of blood and, after being "tried" by the locals, she was condemned as a witch and taken to the middle of the forest, where she was abandoned. According to the story, it was from November of the following year that the children and, in general, the people who had reported the girl began to disappear. At that point there were no more doubts: it was she who had kidnapped them. The citizens left and the city was re-founded in 1824 under the name of Burkittsville but, evidently, this was not enough to stop the disappearances.
Blair Witch begins just like that, with the opening of yet another investigation into a disappearance. The goal of the policemen and Ellis (a former policeman, protagonist of the story) is to find a local boy, Peter Shannon. To be fair, though, the motivation that drives Ellis to join the research with his trusty Belgian Shepherd Bullet is the discovery of himself. He is a man torn by post-traumatic stress, which is kept on his feet by his with Bullet and his ex-wife, Jess. Entering that forest and looking for the little boy is her chance to overcome the trauma.
The first steps in the Black Hills forest allow us to understand how to interact with the game world and manage the with Bullet. The latter will be very useful to us during our journey, not only because it will bring us useful objects for research, it will follow the tracks and indicate the presence of enemies but also from a human point of view. Bullet is Ellis' only companion in the forest, the only embankment to madness that grows step by step. The first moments in which we realize the importance of having him by our side is when we start to have the impression of having lost orientation and of always returning to the same places. Bullet helps to break the moments of loneliness and by being close to it it is possible to reduce the intensity of the protagonist's post-traumatic disorder.
Technology also plays a part in the gaming experience. The torch, the walkie talkie, the cell phone and, above all, the video camera will help us to enter a forest that, in an increasingly progressive way, will tend to reveal its hostility, helping to make us feel suffocated and trapped. The wooded area of the game is certainly one of the best ever seen in a video game, both for the technical and visual side and for the sound side.. Much of the disquiet that you will have during the experience will be caused precisely by the sense of loss - which at times could start to be even frustrating - but also by the sound sector, consisting mainly of rustling, branches that break and croaking of crows.
An interesting dynamic of interaction with the environment is that of cameras, which can change reality by displaying and blocking the red cassettes found during exploration at the right time. This is a very successful mechanic that could have given the title a little more variety. Bloober Team, however, wanted to resort to it on too many occasions and, despite being an interesting gameplay ploy, it could not help but become a repetitive and all too obvious system.
The camera function makes it quite similar to The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter, where there were no cameras but the observation of the environment and the collection of clues allowed the protagonist to relive the previous events vividly. True, these are your titles that bring substantial differences with them, but they also have several points in common. They both want to tell an intense story and let the player orient themselves in the environment to continue the game. Blair Witch, however, also sins in this respect. The game developed by the creators of Layers Of Fear, in fact, can count on a forest reproduced in a refined and masterful way, to say the least, but it does not really push the player to enter it, deviating from the paths established by the developers., as they represent the only way to advance in the experience. These are real tracks, well made, for heaven's sake, which however make the territory of Black Hills much less fascinating than what it should have been.
Once the adventure is over, you get the feeling that everything that happened happened only because we were supposed to make certain moves, although there is not a single ending. This contributes to making it no longer very clear how incisive tracked behavior should be. Despite these flaws, Blair Witch is a game that exerts a strong appeal and that presents distressing moments as well as slower ones, which serve to release the tension. An example of this is the presence of areas where it is possible to use the mobile phone and call loved ones like Jess, who, although not physically present at our side, will be a constant presence on our path, just like Bullet, representing a contact with the reality that it seems to fade more and more as the investigation continues.
Ellis will face almost invisible enemies with only the help of Bullet, which proves very useful to point them with the flashlight and defeat them. This detail is obviously similar to Alan Wake's fights, but it was rendered very well by the developers.
A total change of register takes place in the finale, where the technique of using light to chase away the presences of the forest will no longer work and Ellis will have to resort to other methods. The final sequence of the game, which sees Ellis plunging into the madness of post-traumatic stress and the events caused by the Witch, seems to almost ruin the good that had been done in the previous hours. The developers had proposed an interesting psychological theme that has consistently degenerated. And, if the ending is perfectly in line with the two Blair Witch films, it must be considered that unfortunately it has been divided into repetitive and interminable sequences. Here, some interesting playful finds are submerged by others more useless and repetitive such as jumpscares, which are totally superfluous bearing in mind the good work that had been done to build an ever higher tension during the approximately 6 hours of play.
If you are passionate about the story of the Blair Witch and psychological horror, this Blair Witch is definitely a purchase for you and that, by accepting some compromises, will give you a respectable horror experience.
► Blair Witch is a game developed by Bloober Team for PC and Xbox One, the video game was released on 30/08/2019
