Blair Witch Game (2019)

[St_Eddie]

Trailer

Looks to be every bit as point missing as the 2016 film sequel Blair Witch, what with the monsters covered with twigs running around all over the place.

[biggytitbo]

I can't have been the only one who thought 'oooh a new silent hill game' , only to be disappointed when it turned out to be Blair witch.

[The Boston Crab]

Blair Witch (witch game)

[Zetetic]

Grotesque waste of everyone's time.

Wouldn't the obvious thing to do be to try to capture some of the rough, improvisational verisimilitude of the film in the actual medium of a game, rather than expending a vast amount of effort badly shoving videotape and screen effects as devices into yet-another-linearish photorealistic adventure game?

[Morrison Lard]

verisimilitude

CaB and this word.

What gives..

[Avril Lavigne]

Looks to be every bit as point missing as the 2016 film sequel Blair Witch, what with the monsters covered with twigs running around all over the place.

Very much so.  I'd probably be more interested in playing that clunky early 2000s Blair Witch game trilogy over this thing, even if none of those are particularly faithful to the tone of the original film either.

[Phil_A]

Very much so.  I'd probably be more interested in playing that clunky early 2000s Blair Witch game trilogy over this thing, even if none of those are particularly faithful to the tone of the original film either.

I was just looking up some footage of that, what the fuck.

I'm guessing this started off as some Resident Evil knock-off and was hastily re-purposed once they got the Blair Witch licence? I mean, this is supposed to be part of the same continuity as the low-budget indie film about three students lost in the woods. This.

[Avril Lavigne]

I was just looking up some footage of that, what the fuck.

I'm guessing this started off as some Resident Evil knock-off and was hastily re-purposed once they got the Blair Witch licence? I mean, this is supposed to be part of the same continuity as the low-budget indie film about three students lost in the woods. This.

It's a crossover & pseudo-sequel to the completely unrelated game Nocturne, which is where those very un-Blair-Witch characters originated.  Why that happened at all I have no clue, but Volumes II and III were separate stories based more closely on the historical lore of the film.

[St_Eddie]

I can't think of a single way to make an interesting Blair Witch game, whilst remaining faithful to the spirit of the original film, which is preciously why they shouldn't bother.

EDIT: Well, actually, I suppose that a point & click adventure game could work in theory but that's never going to happen because it's too niche, so yeah; just don't bother.

[Mister Six]

Surely the solution wood be some kind of Pokémon Go type GPS app that lures people out into the woods, where studio employees murder them?

[Zetetic]

I can't think of a single way to make an interesting Blair Witch game, whilst remaining faithful to the spirit of the original film,

Not this or this but something that treated the game as an artefact. (And you could commission fifty or a hundred of these fucking things around some vague ideas - and a lore manual if it's important to you - and bin the ones you didn't feel were up to scratch.)

Rather than trying to just take the found-footage stuff tediously literally (which, yes, probably limits you to something point-and-clicky or Her Story-ish or something).

[The Boston Crab]

The game should be about some people trying to make a game about the Blair Witch and they get sucked into their own game which the BW is now in control of.

There would be some weird deliberate ludo narrative dissonance whereby the player's control of the game and characters is sometimes disrupted apparently by the BW who ends up haunting and tormenting both the characters in the game stuck in the game, the NPCs in-game who learn that the main characters are trapped inside their game and also the actual player across several layers of the meta narrative.

It would not explicitly break the fourth wall like Kojima and address the player, it would be more like Eternal Darkness and subtly disturb the player's sense of reality and make them feel like the witch really did exist and have some control over the player's inputs.

Some people would truly believe that the witch would end them unless they finished the game but in saving themself, they had to sacrifice the characters to perpetuity trapped within the game they built and which the BW took over. No matter how it ended, people would feel awful for days.

[Inspector Norse]

They should make a game where you're the camera guy and you have to try to get footage of the actual Blair Witch, except what will happen is you'll brick yourself when something happens, spin round a bit pointing the camera at the treetops, then not know where to go and spend two hours running through procedurally-generated forest and then delete the fucking thing.

[St_Eddie]

All of these ideas for a Blair Witch game are essentially trying to ram a square peg into a round hole.  There really isn't an organic way to create a Blair Witch game, where the gameplay and setting/lore would work in perfect tandem with each other.  Instead, it's always going to be a case of starting with the film and then desperately working backwards from that and attempting to find some kind of way to support that concept through gameplay.  Concessions are always going to have to be made (hence twig monsters chasing the player through the forest and what have you). Ultimately, The Blair Witch Project simply isn't videogame material because to do it right, the player should never see anything overtly supernatural and let's face it, that would make for an incredibly boring game, or at the very least a non-commercial one.

[biggytitbo]

Will there be a new Bare Bitch project game aswell?

[St_Eddie]

Will there be a new Bare Bitch project game aswell?

You should develop it yourself, biggy.  If you build it, they will cum.

[St_Eddie]

The developers have revealed what direction they're taking the game in.  As per Bloody-Disgusting...

Bloober Team took everyone by surprise with their E3 announcement that they'd not only be creating a Blair Witch game for PC and Xbox One, but that they'd also be targeting August 30 for the release. That announcement didn't exactly have a lot of meat to it, so in an interview with Eurogamer, writer Basia Kciuk and team developer Maciej Głomb sat down to do a little explaining.

According to Bloober, the project began about two years ago after the team had finished up Observer. The team was looking for a new project, and coincidentally, Lionsgate was looking for a company that would "transition...the Blair Witch cinematic universe to video games".

With that, the Observer team was split into three, with one team focusing on Layers of Fear 2, the second team the Blair Witch game, and the third team focusing on a project "which [Bloober] can't really talk about".

As for what the game would be about, Kciuk stated that it was a complicated question. "So far, we focus more on the psychological layer of the story. With the original Blair Witch, there wasn't so much of this psychological element. We observed how the characters are reacting but the film didn't dwell on backstory. We got a great chance from Lionsgate to tell our own story. We both wanted this entrapment in a forest, this feeling of being alone, of being surrounded by something greater than you, something you can't really fight with, and we wanted this psychological layer of the story."

That being said, Lionsgate gave Bloober a lot of freedom with the game. "It's not like, 'Oh, the Blair Witch can do this, this and this.' No. It's like, 'Blair Witch is this concept for us – work with it.'"

As for combat, the game will be similar in style to the mechanics of Alan Wake, but without guns. "It's similar in the way you also have a flashlight, but in Alan Wake you have a flashlight and conventional weapons," says Głomb. "You don't have that here because it was not really fitting to the universe; you don't really see anyone running with a shotgun around the Blair Witch forest. So your only weapon is a flashlight. It's more of a way for you to get rid of the monsters, to escape them. You don't really kill them, you fend them off."

For inspiration, the team drew upon a variety of games. Slender Man was one inspiration, but due to the length of that game, it was only "for a moment". "One we really liked, although it's not a horror game, was Firewatch. It was a great adventure in a forest while being, technically, alone – you can talk with another person but otherwise you are alone out there. Although it was not scary, it was more of a mystery, it was great to look at the mechanisms, to look at the how the story unfolds, the pacing."

The team also drew inspiration from Outlast and Silent Hills, but also films such as [REC] and Paranormal Activity.

When asked about other platforms, Głomb and Kciuk were reluctant to talk about PlayStation 4 and the Nintendo Switch. "For now, we are focusing on Xbox and PC but we will discuss the other platforms in the future," says Głomb. That being said, there's always the possibility of a later release. "The Switch version [of Layers of Fear and Observer] wasn't released at the start but it came out finally, so it might be a similar situation here."

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"With the original Blair Witch, there wasn't so much of this psychological element."

What kind of thing is that to say?  The Blair Witch Project didn't have a psychological element to its horror?  The horror was almost entirely derived from the psychological aspect in The Blair Witch Project.

"So far, we focus more on the psychological layer of the story. With the original Blair Witch, there wasn't so much of this psychological element. We observed how the characters are reacting but the film didn't dwell on backstory.

That being said, Lionsgate gave Bloober a lot of freedom with the game. "It's not like, 'Oh, the Blair Witch can do this, this and this.' No. It's like, 'Blair Witch is this concept for us – work with it.'"

TRANSLATION: "We're not aware of any of the pre-existing backstory or lore and are making it up as we go along."

"It's similar in the way you also have a flashlight, but in Alan Wake you have a flashlight and conventional weapons.  You don't have that here because it was not really fitting to the universe; you don't really see anyone running with a shotgun around the Blair Witch forest. So your only weapon is a flashlight. It's more of a way for you to get rid of the monsters, to escape them. You don't really kill them, you fend them off."

You know what else isn't fitting to the universe?  RUNNING AROUND, FENDING OFF GREAT BIG FUCKING HULKING FUCKING MONSTERS WITH A FUCKING FLASHLIGHT!

[BritishHobo]

I just don't know why they keep trying to further explore this 'universe'. The thing that made it so memorable was its standalone mystery. Even if you weren't sucked in by it supposedly being real found footage of real people who had gone missing, it was still a one-off event that scared you because it left you with something weird and unresolved - rather than an ending where they figure out the witch's secret and destroy her. It's a perfect, effective ghost story. It doesn't need any more.

[madhair60]

I think it should be a 2D platformer on the Game Boy.

I'm only 20% joking, I honestly think that would be the best direction. A 2D platformer that is clearly fucking nothing to do with the movie, where you collect the little twig symbol instead of coins, and the final boss is an actual witch flying around on a broom like fucking Gruntilda.

[St_Eddie]

I think it should be a 2D platformer on the Game Boy.

I'm only 20% joking, I honestly think that would be the best direction. A 2D platformer that is clearly fucking nothing to do with the movie, where you collect the little twig symbol instead of coins, and the final boss is an actual witch flying around on a broom like fucking Gruntilda.

I'd actually prefer this because, then at least, it could be more easily dismissed as being a part of the canon by anyone who would claim otherwise.  You just know that some toadying corporate suck up is going to say "the 2019 Blair Witch game is officially canonical to the the original film".  Then again, they'd probably still claim that a Mario stand-in, collecting stick-figure shaped 'coins' is somehow canonical to the universe.  "In the interests of increasing their profits and expanding their shares, a corporate entity deemed it so and therefore, you cannot possibly refute that".  I've seen this very thing happen with far too many films which I love (see: Predators within the Alien universe).

"Hey, guys.  Hot take theory here: if Heather and Mike had collected enough stick-figure coins within the Black Hills forest, then they might have had enough power to summon a Predator and defeat the witch boss in the original film".  Fuck off.

[Thursday]

I think it should be a 2D platformer on the Game Boy.

I'm only 20% joking, I honestly think that would be the best direction. A 2D platformer that is clearly fucking nothing to do with the movie, where you collect the little twig symbol instead of coins, and the final boss is an actual witch flying around on a broom like fucking Gruntilda.

This would be good also, because as it's set in a forest, which is just miles of flat land, they'd have to come up with a lot of ideas to make it work as a platform game.

[The Boston Crab]

Finally played this because it's on Game Pass. It's a really slow dog walking simulator with terrible performance. Very strange. Not worth anyone's time making or playing.