Blair Witch (You Can Pet the Dog Horror Game)

 

Any nerd has probably seen their fair share of videogame adaptations based on friggin awesome movies and considering the biblical magnificence of the cult classic The Blair Witch Project (1999) we can pretty much saw this coming (sooner or later). The iconic hype behind the film’s take on cursed woods discombobulating back-packing survivors to hopeless desires almost guaranteed that someone would try to ride the wave of success of a now shallow videogame genre. What I expected to be a paint-scraper horror experience, scavenging off the corpse of what made the original so good to only depressingly collapse under lame tropes actually presented some visceral gameplay with erotic fan service.

   

Blair Witch is a mind-bending psychological horror experience portraying the story of a broken man suffering from his tragic past alongside his goodest boy “Bullet,” who represents any sanity he has remaining. Why is the dog adorable in such a twisted horror game? Because he doesn’t know any better, he just is. Bullet is loaded with a plethora of commands to assist while you’re balls deep in the spooktacular woods field trip (thankfully including a scratchies command). It’s worth noting he can glitch occasionally and it is accidentally terrifying. I wasn’t sure what was more horrific: a contorted witch aggressively darting around me or the fact that Bullet was rotated on a 90° angle inside some dilapidated floor boards whilst snarling at a snail or something. I liked the ideas: ominous, glowing fiends zapping around you like projectiles, but unfortunately this is one of those games where the fear factor suffers from the source material. Things like an approaching attack stalled by a tree in the witch’s way, or dialogue of terror being cut short by Ellis saying “good boy Bullet” caused some moments to be as scary as someone chasing you with a booger on their fingertip. Blair Witch, at times, is its own existential crisis.

 

Blair Witch Official Steam Page

Written by The Moore of Babylon

Blair Witch
Bloober Team (developer), Bloober Team NA (publisher)
3.9 / 5