Review Hacksaw 2/5 · Dec 14, 2025
Blair What Now?
Blair Witch lives entirely in the space between atmosphere and design. Its most interesting qualities and its most frustrating goddamn failures live within that gap. Replaying it on PC with max settings clarified something that was way harder to appreciate on the not-so-great console release: it's often competently effective on a purely sensory level. The forest breathes, light filters through …
Blair Witch lives entirely in the space between atmosphere and design. Its most interesting qualities and its most frustrating goddamn failures live within that gap. Replaying it on PC with max settings clarified something that was way harder to appreciate on the not-so-great console release: it's often competently effective on a purely sensory level. The forest breathes, light filters through leaves with a convincing density, shadows feel heavy, and the sound design does a lot of quiet work. Footsteps crunch with just enough presence, branches snap somewhere behind you - or was it to the side? - and for long stretches, BW understands exactly what kind of dread it wants to cultivate.
But that dread is constantly undercut by the very systems meant to sustain it.
BW is strongest when it leans into unrelenting unease instead of distinct threats. Horror of this kind thrives on the absence of relief. The original film understood that on an intuitive level: as an audience, we're completely denied any kind of catharsis, explanation, or even the mercy of a clearly defined protagonist. Do you know who the protag of the film was? I sure fuckin don't. The game, on the other hand, introduces "enemies" that have to be dispatched by a flashlight beam and in so doing inadvertently imposes a rhythm that horror should try to resist. Music swells, lights flicker, visual distortion intensifies and you know immediately and unambiguously that you're entered a combat phase. When the music fades and the screen settles, you know you're safe again. The forest becomes, I don't know, legible? even polite. Whatever tenion existed between encounters drains away and is replaced by the reassuring knowledge that danger is temporary, scheduled, and mechanically trivial.
I guess I'd chalk the game's biggest failing up to this: it tells you too much, too clearly, about when to be afraid, and as a result, it isn't.
The flashlight combat itself isn't challenging in any capacity. I don't think it's meant to be, to be fair. But that only exacerbates the problem. Once it becomes clear that these enemies are the only real obstacles, and that they announce themselves loudly and leave just as predictably, the woods lose their menace. How could they not? You're never afraid of what might happen - you're just waiting for the next scripted inconvenience to resolve itself. At that point, BW begins to resemble a walking simulator with occasional interruptions rather than a sustained exercise in dread. After all, aesthetics/art direction alone can't shoulder that burden indefinitely (hence why I can't stand Bloober's other walking sim horrors a la Layers of Fear and The Medium).
All of this is further troubled by BW's handling of psychological distress, especially its depiction of PTSD. Bloober Team clearly wants to take the subject seriously - I think it does, anyway - and there's an earnestness there that sets the game apart from more flippant treatments of trauma. The developers have leveraged things like camera shake, blurred vision, auditory distortion, and trembling hands to try and convey internal collapse. But these representations still end up feeling generalized, less like an attempt to inhabit a specific person's experience and more like a checklist of symptoms translated into visual effects. For someone familiar with PTSD from lived experience, that translation feels... tenuous at best. It's not that those sensations never occur, it's that their use in BW doesn't have the nuance required to create real empathy. Without that nuance, what we get is a portrayal that ends up feeling stereotypical and shallow and I can't help but feel it kind of "sets back" the perception towards video games' tendency to instrumentalize mental health as an aesthetic rather than attempt to actually explore it as a human reality.
But let me shift to what it does well. I gotta say, it's brilliant in its evocation of the forest itself. Personally, it resonated with me. As a child, there was a vast swath of relatively untouched forest literally a stone's throw away from my suburban household. I spent countless summers and winters alike wandering those woods with the careless confidence that only childhood affords. It looked pristine from the edge: an unbroken wall of trees, underbruh thick enough to suggest permanence, a place somehow exempt from the human world it bordered. The deeper you went, though, the illusion slowly unraveled. Signs of past habitation emerged like half-buried memories. Maybe it' was the collapsed tin roof sagging under decades of rot. Maybe it was the heaps of trash so old they felt archaeological instead of littered. Maybe it was the rusted wheelbarrow under the birch tree that was swallowed by briars. Or maybe it was the early 20th century truck overtaken by vines and moss, itsoriginal purpose rendered unknowable by time. Discoveries like these never felt neutral: they carried a strange and indefinable unease with them, like I'd stumbled into a space I wasn't meant to witness, a record of human presence that had been quietly erased but not fully forgotten.
What unsettled me most was the implication behind the objects rather than the objects themselves. Someone had lived here once. They worked here once. And they had subsequently abandoned this place, after which the forest had moved in without ceremony, reclaiming it with total indifference. There were no explanations, no plaques, no comforting narrative to situate what I was seeing. Even before I ever watched The Blair Witch Project, this kind of environment struck directly at the core of my fears. The film just gave a language and a mythology to something I already felt viscerally: the woods aren't empty, not in any reassuring sense, and that evidence of human intrusion only makes that absence louder. It suggests absence, stories cut short and never explained. Despite or perhaps because of that fear, I was and am deeply fascinated by this kind of exploration. I spend a lot of hours watching urban explorers find these kinds of things in wooded areas. There's something magnetic about moving through spaces where time had folded in on itself, or to get a little more pretentious with it, where the boundary between civilization and wilderness had eroded into something ambiguous and unsettling.
I regret, genuinely, not exploring those woods more fully before they were cleared to make room for yet another development of overpriced, poorly built homes, their fuckin ugly characterless identical facades standing where something unknowable once quietly persisted. That loss sharpened my appreciation for games that attempt to recreate not just the look but the feeling of a truly wild forest. Not a theme-park version of wilderness, not a thinly veiled level dressed up with trees while guiding the player along obvious paths and invisible rails, none of that shit, but a space that resists legibility and allows disorientation, or a space that feels older and less... accommodating than the player themselves. This fuckin game, for all its mechanical shortcomings, understands this impulse. It contains all the usual design contrivances like funnels, signposting, and controlled progression, but it disguises them with enough care and restraint that the forest feels convincingly American, convincingly untamed. In doing so, it taps into something far more primal than scripted scares: the quiet dread of walking through a place that remembers humans, even if humans no longer remember it.
Just gave myself chills, y'all.
Your canine companion Bullet plays a strong role in this balance. His presence keeps you from being completely isolated but it introduces a different and arguably sharper anxiety: responsibility gasp! You're no longer alone with your fear; you are accountable for someone else within it. The game wisely makes no promise to guarantee Bullet's safety or survival, allowing uncertainty to linger whenever he disappears into the undergrowth, which he does, a lot. And he also functions as an organic navigational tool by acting as a compass in the environment designed to disorient you. I really like this design choice, and it reinforces immersion more often than it breaks it.
And there are moments of impressive creativity in the game too, particularly the sequences where navigating depends on careful attention to the video recorder you find. It forces you to split your attention between direct vision and the mediated perception of the recorder's screen. Fog obscures your path and enemies lurk just out of sight. Orientation itself because a tense thing in that situation. But sadly, these sequences suffer from inconsistent internal logic. The rules governing what the camera can and cannot reveal aren't always clearly communicated, which can sometimes turn the nerve-wracking puzzles into moments of confusion rooted more in design shortcomings than deliberate ambiguity.
As BW approaches its conclusion, it collapses into and leans egregiously on one of the most overused tropes in modern game design: the fucking prolonged hallucination sequence. Loops, loops, more loops, repetition, nonsensical tasks, endless corridors, sensory overload stretched far beyond its welcome. I get that these sequences are supposed to simulate psychological breakdown, but holy shit, they are so irritating. Can we please stop including these in games? There's no goal, no meaningful interaction, just movement for movement's sake until the game decides to finally fucking advance. I remember it first with Far Cry 3's drug-induced sequence, and even then it annoyed me, and now, it's ossified into a lazy shorthand for "internal chaos." It's especially egregious here. It categorically does not intensify immersion; it completely fuckin drains momentum and patience alike. I was absolutely done with this game five minutes into this sequence that more or less kept up for the next 45 minutes.
I'm almost done! The story in this game is serviceable, at best, when taken out of the context of the source material, but it's deeply deeply unsatisfying in relation to the film. The connection between the two is superficial, almost incidental. It wouldn't take much to convince me that the game originated as an unrelated project and was later retrofitted with the Blair Witch license. Beyond the setting and nominal presence of a so-called "witch," there really isn't much that meaningfully engages with the film's themes, structure, and definitely not its restraint. For fans of the film, this is a double edged sword. On one hand, BW's distance from the film preserves the films mystique, sparing it from dilution or reinterpretation. On the other hand, it effectively forecloses the possibility of something far more interesting: a true interactive analogue to the film's oppressive minimalism, a Blair Witch equivalent to Alien: Isolation. That's some unrealized potential right there, and it hangs heavily over the experience.
So, I guess BW is an interesting game but it's not frightening. It understands atmosphere, environment, and mood much more than it understands tension. Thanks to its telegraphing danger, its simplifying threats, and leaning way too heavily on tired design conventions, all fear it seeks to evoke is completely undermined. What remains, then? A short-lived but thoughtfully rendered forest, a paltry offering of applaudable mechanics, and a big heaping dose of "what might have been."
