Blair Witch (Switch) Review – Into The Woods

1999’s The Blair Witch Project is perhaps one of the most iconic horror films of all time. A no-budget independent film that kick-started the use of the found-footage narrative used in both films and videogames, even to this day! On top of that, it’s seeming like videogames are the new home for all of your favorite horror franchises to be revived. Whether it be standalone experiences like Friday the 13^th: The Game or every horror character ever becoming DLC for Dead by Daylight, there’s a lot for horror fans to indulge in. So it was both surprising and unsurprising when Bloober Team announced they’d be developing a modern Blair Witch game for current platforms. The game has been out on Xbox One and PC since late-August last year but is coming to Nintendo Switch (today) June 25^th.

Bloober Team is most well-known for their recent jump into the horror genre with both installments of the Layers of Fear franchise and their Blade Runner-inspired >observer_. I’ve played both Layers games and I thought the first one was completely and totally unintentionally hilarious (search “Jerma This is supposed to be a scary game” on YouTube) while I felt like the second was actually a really, really solid experience. (By the way, wherein the hell is that Switch port of Layers 2?) Blair Witch is not the first game based on the franchise (it’s actually the fourth), but when you have games like Outlast have been giving us a view of what a camcorder-wielding romp through the evil woods would look like for a few years. So it was easy to assume what I was potentially jumping into.

A quick summary of the plot: You play as Ellis, a former cop, and you’re sent into the Black Hills forest looking for a missing boy named Peter. You’re accompanied by your trusty (and customizable) dog sidekick Bullet. From there, you’re thrust into mysterious and mischievous woods where all sorts of trouble await to hammer away at your psyche.

As far as the gameplay goes, it’s the same standard fare you’d expect from a $30-and-under horror game made post-Amnesia: The Dark Descent. But the one thing that stands out is a wider array of equipment at your disposal. There’s a flashlight, knapsack for keeping clues, a walkie-talkie for other characters to talk to you, and even a fully-featured cellphone (complete with changeable ringtones and mini-games and even brightness settings). Of course in Blair Witch-fashion you’re also given a camcorder that you use to playback tapes that can manipulate time and space to help solve puzzles and clear blockages. You also get a dog! Complete with a ring of different commands. And yes, don’t worry Twitter. You can pet the dog. You can even feed it treats.

This all may sound like a lot and it totally is. So imagine my surprise when the game doesn’t really seem to utilize much of these mechanics to any real meaningful length. The walkie-talkie and cellphone are basically just plot devices and serve no purpose outside of those, so you almost never use them. The knapsack is also rarely used since it’s an inventory for items you can’t really use (except for dog treats). So other than the times you use the camcorder to solve puzzles, you’re going to almost always have the flashlight out with no reason to ever put it away.

Even the dog is under-utilized. You have an entire wheel of 5 different commands and there is never any reason to use any of them. Yeah, petting the dog is cute. Plus you also have to occasionally do it to unlock one of the better endings. But you can also reprimand the dog for… no real rhyme or reason. It’s just there if you hate dogs, I guess. There’s also a heel and keep close option which doesn’t really affect anything or even work most of the time. And then there’s the seek option. In which you can have the dog seek out clues and retrieve them. Unless it’s a puzzle piece or something, in which even though the dog has to retrieve it to continue, the command does nothing and you have to manually inspect the object or little hideaway and then press an on-screen prompt. So all the commands are basically useless.

So yes, the gameplay itself is very underwhelming. But as I’ve said in previous horror game reviews, these games are all about the experience more than the actual game. This is where Blair Witch thrives and oh boy does it succeed. The game’s atmosphere is near-flawless. Using a fantastic blend of dark and moody environments, set-pieces of all sorts of trippy and terrifying visuals, and even using binaural audio to give the illusion of voices and sounds appearing from off in the distance to even up close to your ear. The last hour, in particular, is absolutely bonkers and just felt like a constant bombardment of anxiety and horror drilled directly into your eyes and ears. Compared to most other contemporary horror games of this nature, it’s definitely one of the better when it comes to scares and setting. I don’t want to spoil some of the really fantastic sequences in the game but one that I was fond of was the environment, itself. The game somewhat paints the location as one big open map but it’s actually a series of smaller maps the game suddenly loads when moving about. And the game even uses this method of using smaller maps to create a larger map as a way to disorient the player and make them feel like they’re truly lost in a gigantic forest and going in circles.

But…let’s talk about that setting for a moment. Are we forgetting something? This is supposed to be a game based on The Blair Witch so… what’s up with that? Well, your guess is as good as mine. The lore of the franchise isn’t exactly the deepest but it does exist. Hell, the creators of the original film even managed to create a full-length mockumentary full of lore to hype up the release of the original Blair Witch Project. And yet, it seems like almost all of that has been thrown to the wayside. Of course, all the famous iconography is there and directly lifted from the first film. The totems, the camcorder, the polaroids, the dudes staring at corners, the basement. It’s all there. But it all seemingly takes a big step back in order for our protagonist to take up the majority of this game’s plot and focus. I don’t totally feel that it’s too much of a bad thing since I believe the game and story we got is still a pretty enjoyable experience, but it is pretty damn disappointing that they made this game based on an IP and did a whopping nothing with it.

Finally, let’s talk about the port itself. As one would expect, it has a bit of the “UE4 Crust™️” (shimmering edges, muddy foliage, you know what I’m talking about). It’s nowhere as visually impressive or performance-stable as something like Outlast 2 but I do feel like the game overall looks pretty good for something that was designed for the Xbox One and then ported to the Switch’s mobile hardware. Performance is pretty alright too with the framerate remaining stable most of the time, even in very intense sequences, but still will occasionally drop or stutter in much more large and open environments. But since the game is a horror first-person walker, when the framerate does drop, it basically has 0 effects on the experience as a whole. One thing I will note is the game using a very heft depth-of-field effect for most of the game as a way of obscuring what objects and environments you’re approaching. I can imagine some thinking that the game just runs at a really low resolution because of this but no, it’s just there for ambiance. Maybe we can pester Bloober enough to patch in an option to turn it down or off.

I also ran into a handful of bugs along the way. Mostly clipping related. Bullet occasionally managed to poke his head through a wall and it happened to Ellis once during an animation in a cramped tunnel. Probably the oddest glitch was the game loading in a glitched-out version of one of the maps that had no objects and or lighting. Managed to walk up and off the edge of the world. But I wasn’t able to replicate this. Might have just been one of those freak things.

Overall, I was quite pleased with Blair Witch. Its mechanics and use of the Blair Witch IP sure leave a lot to be desired, but if you’re just playing it as another first-person horror game it’s most definitely worth the trip to the woods.

(Special thanks to Bloober Team and Evolve PR for supplying a review code)