Certain experiences translate better to other mediums. Sometimes a show makes more sense as a movie, other times a book beats the series and so forth. Given Blair Witch was always somewhat physiological, it makes sense a game would do well. Years later we get that chance and while it might not check every box, it looks to offer all kinds of thrills and chills the original franchise had. However, given the history of games based on things, will Blair Witch stand above them or fall behind? Here’s our Blair Witch Review.
In this adventure, you’re looking for a kid who gets lost in the woods. A search party has been around for a while, a number of areas have been checked but you have a dog and are determined to find this kid. It’s enough of a set up to justify bringing you into the mysterious woods but it, like a lot of things, is mostly the introduction to the madness.
Shortly after experiencing most of the horror clichés, things start to seem weird. This begins with a campsite that you repeatedly end up at, despite moving forward and trying to end up in a new location. As you continue, eventually things start to seem weird and a later revisit will have a camera. Watching the video alters our reality, in this instance bringing a car from the video to the current time and is your first introduction to the truly bizarre things in Blair Witch. Despite this, the charm quickly wears off.
The best way to describe Blair Witch is a convoluted adventure that you play based on the promise of the future, instead of anything the story itself says. Searching the woods with your dog might be fun for some, but most people playing this want a spooky adventure that it constantly builds towards, without ever really achieving. At best it’s mildly interesting and at worse you’re hoping the next thing will grip you.
Throughout your adventure, you’ll have choices that will impact the way the story plays out, except most of them are seemingly minor. There is nothing that really stands out, nor is there anything worth worrying about. Answer phone or not, search a location or avoid and so forth. For a fairly large world, you can explore, as the woods have a good amount of things to see, it’s oddly linear. There is only really one way to progress forward and you simply can’t make choices that are detrimental to your adventure. For instance, it will stop you from entering the woods without a walkie or you need to explore a cave before falling below, taking away from the choose your adventure portion of the adventure. Even if this would be fine if Blair Witch was fun to play.
Despite largely being a point and click adventure, there is an oddly high number of options and menus you have to shift between. Like you can control your dog through a variety of commands, though much only work under specific conditions and in some cases have limited functionality besides doing it for the sake of it, or you can pull out your phone and read things like text. It’s not the worst thing to have, at times it’s hard to say it’s even a negative, it just obstructs the adventure.
Where Man of Medan shined was making things very apparent. There wasn’t a system of buttons you needed to press and then a direction you needed to hit to do something, you just wandered around and seemingly pointless choices had lasting repercussions on the story. Here you wait until something appears or the dog finds something, you interact with it and then move forward until the next thing in hopes something interesting happens.
Even this would be fine if we had an interesting world like the ghost ship or something, except this, takes place in a fairly bland woodland area. Between a lack of quality, basic choices and the general sense of the same, despite some areas looking legitimately different, it just doesn’t make for an exciting experience.
Blair Witch Review – Verdict
The long and short of Blair Witch comes down to how much you’re willing to invest. If the journey means more than the destination, you can actually find a fair amount of joy in this adventure. It’s just those looking for a simpler experience or possibly more interesting things than watching a video and having something weird happen, followed by some dialogue about how weird that was. So, unless you really want to explore the woods in hopes of scares, this is one adventure you can probably skip out on.
[Editor’s Note: Blair Witch was reviewed on PS4 platform. The game was provided to us by the publisher for review purposes.]
