trauma as primary subtext, or just 'text', needs to go away. shoo. vanish. or at least the horror community need to find another topic from the giant fishbowl of pain they mine for stories, because then you wind up with this: a game about a man with like, let's see... one-two-three-four-potentially five or six instigating traumas. two of them are so identical it genuinely feels like a mistake that they both made it into the game. criticising this game for doing a poor-to-damaging job of representing mental illness and trauma victims is giving it too much credit because it feels like a game whose writer fell asleep at the wheel and crashed through a convenience store. ignorance might not seem like a good defence but the intent seems harmless, driven by cliches and broad trends/modern conventions rather than intentionally calculating and cold.

on the flipside, i can't help but just vibe with the kind of horror design bloober are aiming to make. this feels like a better version of what resident evil 7 thought it was. the ending is maybe too painfully long and the game's moral and stealth systems seem broken and boring respectively. however, i love taking solitary walks in a big, beautiful scary forest. the monsters in the game are barely visible and present but terrifying as hell, genuinely feels like the woods themselves are attacking you. there's virtually no combat aside from a torch which i like. bloober's penchant for using video games to push physical spaces to insane proportions is on show once again too. a forest can become a warzone in a blink of an eye. a sudden burst of light can turn night into day. the blair witch house can be an insane horror maze. i love this shit, i can't deny it.

and the support the dog the game gives you. it's such a great catharsis. the dog affords the player almost the same level of comfort he offers the main character. you never feel alone or abandoned with him by your side. bullet is his name and he's one of the all-time video game pets.

i don't think bloober are capable of crafting a rich, compelling narrative. if anything, they're doing the opposite. but i do think they have a good head for horror design philosophy and can are making some of the richest visual horror games around. they're like the zack snyder/michael bay of horror games: dumb as a bag of bricks, but man they know to craft an image or two.

Um dos melhores Walking Simulator que já joguei!

O foco do jogo é estritamente na narrativa, tanto nos acontecimentos do jogo em si como interpretar o background do protagonista Ellis!

Existem estruturas de puzzles mas são muito simples, eles poderia ser bem mais desafiadores e criativos! Existe um esquema de relacionamento com o doguinho que poderia ser mais bem aprofundado também!

O jogo possui uma série de detalhes opcionais de narrativa e interação que são gostosinhos de encontrar!


Bruxa de Blair Nota 8

How was Blair Witch going to translate to a video game, considering you don't even see the antagonist in the found-footage movie off which it's based? The answer is, not extraordinarily well.

Blair Witch does a decent job at atmosphere as you slowly get deeper into the forest, guided along by your dog companion (buttons to give him treats and petting him are excellent ways to endear me to him). I liked the fact that the game doesn't always feel so linear that it gets disinteresting. It's more involved than developer Bloober Team's Layers of Fear, which to me was an underwhelming jump scare-fest without enough interactivity. Here at least you can die and have to respond appropriately to threats to your character at times.

Light environmental puzzle solving as well as a mechanic involving your video camera are somewhat enjoyable, but the game never can fully shake the tedium of a walking simulator sort of experience. I really do think this game might've benefitted from dropping the Blair Witch IP connection entirely so it doesn't need to have the threats feel somewhat intangible for most of the game. Overall a fairly mediocre horror game but I at least didn't feel like I wasted my time.

While it may not be saying much from what I've played, this is Bloober Team's most accomplished work yet. Still need to play The Medium and Observer but here we see their minor (but nonetheless valid) talent for crafting ravishing and atmospheric environments utilized to maximum effect thanks to their dedication in making the player truly feel lost within this cursed forest. There are moments that unlike anything in both Layers of Fear titles where I felt mildly unsettled, which I'll take at this point. While it builds off of an established IP (the Blair Witch mythology demands to be further explicated apparently), they interestingly explore how the titular witch's influence enables inherent traumas and makes one act on their most morbid impulses. The game feels more Book of Shadows in that way than it does the original classic. It's messy storytelling overall because of Bloober Team's insistent lack of nuance and bludgeoning of capital T themes and in the end doesn't quite stick the punch line to these ideas but at least it has a basic minimal understanding of what constitutes as "psychological horror". Bloober Team is giving me tasty scraps and I guess I ate (mostly in part to the dog tbh), but I feel once they get over their obsession with PT they can deliver something truly idiosyncratic to the horror medium. There are traces of it here beyond the terrible enemy encounters and shoddy dog AI because otherwise, I had fun.

The existence of this game is baffling to me. Blair Witch is an odd license to use for anything at this point let alone a video game. The last film was from a few years back and it didn't exactly excel from a critical or commercial standpoint, before that it's been an even longer period since the second film and the first attempts at a Blair Witch game (a trilogy of PC games). Add in the fact that the license itself feels like a bit of an afterthought here (this feels like it could be any first person horror title with Blair Witch elements thrown in at the last second) and it's an odd experience. Having said that, I was pretty excited for this game as a fan of the first two films and the general concept behind the series.

What we ended up with is pretty standard first person horror fare. My biggest issues came from the disastrous performance and glitchiness of the game. The game was in a choppy state at nearly all times which hurt not only the fun factor but also the general mood and atmosphere. Add in glitches like Bullet (our trusty canine companion) flat out disappearing to not be found again, getting softlocked by picking up an item until quitting and reloading, and wonky enemy behavior among other things for a pretty rough experience.

It wasn't all bad, thankfully. The atmosphere at times is pretty great. I'm a pretty seasoned horror veteran but walking through the woods in the dark was definitely spooky at times and it captured the feeling of what doing the same in real life would be like. I'd also like to praise the last chapter or so which is where the Blair Witch feeling was well and truly nailed. If the whole game was on that level this could've been a favorite of mine even with the performance troubles.

Overall this was a bit disappointing for sure. I'd recommend it for big fans of the license or fans of first person horror under the condition of them going in with well adjusted expectations. I played through this over a few days on Game Pass and that's how I'd suggest those who are curious do as well.

Very silly, very boring, very pointless.

At one point your character screams "No! I can't take it anymore! Make it stop!".

Oh, mate. I'm there with ye, son. I was with ye the whole way. Especially when I got to the excruciating end sequence and I was ready to jump out the window and live the rest of my days as a pigeon.

That's what Blair Witch does to ye. It makes ye want to be a pigeon.

This is standard non-scary tedious Bloober Team nonsense. Avoid and don't waste your time.