I give this a 2.5 but rounded it up. EDIT: Nah, it's a two.

Don't really know where to start with this one. I wanted to like it so bad, I really did, and was super hyped to play it but honestly, it's a giant mess. It's like the developers didn't know what kind of game they wanted to make. Is it a horror? A psych thriller, a war game, a murder mystery, a study in PTSD? There were so many elements that they tried to squish in that it just didn't make much sense. The graphics were underwhelming and the forest layout was so bland that everything looked the same. I ended up wandering around the same patch of wood for 20 minutes because it wasn't clear at all what I was supposed to do. Also, the game is riddled with bugs. I had to restart it twice because either the dog had disappeared or I was stuck in a corner somewhere and couldn't move. The ending just dragged on and on, resulting in me feeling like finishing the game had become a chore and I just wanted it to be over. It went from being quite creepy to just plain annoying. Plus, the ending felt so cheap!!! You went through all these maze like levels just for it to end flat on its face. The only pros that I can give it is a good soundtrack and clever use of the dog and camera to keep with the movie style but that's about it. Pretty disappointing :(

Going into Blair Witch I was hesitant (due to Bloober's reputation online) but thankfully I was thrilled to see a lot of interesting design elements on display, a gorgeously spooky atmosphere, and a harrowing finale.

The player controls Ellis Lynch, a former veteran and former police officer who has some personal demons to attend to and a strange relationship to the Black Hills forest. Upon hearing about a missing boy in the woods, he and his trusty dog set out to find the boy and end up in an unsettling nightmare world where time jumps, horrific creatures, and a deranged killer lie within.

The gameplay seems pretty straightforward at first. Light adventure elements control the path forward, and the player can pick up items, read logs, and collect strange idols and victim photographs. Along with him is his dog Bullet (with customizable fur and collar!) that the player can interact with via a variety of commands. While it's not totally obvious what some of the commands do (reprimanding, petting, feeding snacks) it's tempting to treat Bullet like a real dog and get immersed in following him in the woods, as he can sniff objects and help out in some cases.

As the game continues there are tapes that the player can play in a camcorder - while I won't spoil some of the mechanics that are eventually used for it, the game is just secretive enough to encourage poking around and seeing what part of the tape or camcorder will get the player out of the woods. And there are a LOT of places to get lost, which may risk frustration for some players. While the game seems like a walking sim to just get from point A to point B, the game allows quite a bit of exploration that will hinder the player if they don't stay on their toes and pay close attention to what's in front of them.

As for the scares, the quality can vary, and death states are possible. Sometimes the player has to hastily shine their light on foes or sneak past them, and the objective rapidly changes from segment to segment. While this doesn't build on a core design from start to finish (which for this game is a short length) it throws the player into quite a few encounters where they have to rapidly get up to speed and figure things out as shadow creatures drag them into the night, which helps build a lot of good scares. The final segment is also an excellent mindscrew worthy of P.T., as nightmares and surprises reward the seemingly repetitious journey into a familiar house...

Apart from gameplay mechanics, the graphics and sound design are incredible for a horror game. The woods are meticulously detailed and I legitimately wanted to hike in these for days, while the darkness and dilapidation never fails to create a sense of oppressive dread. The sound is ambient and filled with plenty of jumps and howls and sudden noises - it does the job for a horror game but soundtrack-wise there's nothing too memorable with regards to tunes.

The biggest downside of this game (if any, since it does so much right) is unfortunately the core story of the character. Gulf War and police trauma create a thoroughly damaged character in Ellis, though his story is less interesting than the story of the woods itself. The voice acting is pretty decent, but Ellis's actor could do a little more to sound genuinely terrified and traumatized as the game demands.

Blair Witch is a satisfying and terrifying game to add to the Blair Witch catalog, as Bloober Team plays to their strengths and tries some new things along the way to keep the player on their toes and plays excellently to the tone of the first two Blair Witch movies. The ending requirements might be a little obtuse and the main character's story might not be the most engaging but it's a trip in the woods worth taking.

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."

FOR

1. The video recordings we find keep it interesting.
2. We can really feel like we are lost in a forest, and.. it can get annoying sometimes. But hey! That's what it feels like getting lost.
3. Some puzzles that involve playing around with the recordings in order to progress.
4. Uncovering what happened and figuring out our connection to the case.
5. Exploring the forest itself and interacting with our dog seem to be the strongest elements that keep us going.
6. There are some well designed locations but you will also experience patches of grass suddenly showing up in front of you.
7. Music and voice acting (the audible one, at least)
8. Good attempt at expressing how traumatic experiences can affect us.

AGAINST

1. Missing audio during telephone/radio conversations - annoying.
2. Disappearing dog - happened twice throughout the game forcing me to restart from checkpoint.
3. The story itself feels rather cliche.
4. Collecting useless photographs of devs (Easter egg?) breaks the 4th wall. In a game like this, I would rather see some photos related to game events.
5. What the game fails to deliver is to tell you when your actions actually matter. It is hard to tell which decisions are going to shape the ending when Blair Witch feels rather linear overall. In other words, we don’t know what to do differently even if we were to replay it. That does not encourage you to try again.
6. There seems to be no level of difficulty.
7. It would be useful if Ellis scribed some notes or drew a map as he explores the forest.
8. Navigating the inventory seems clunky.
9. Lengthy ending: the final sequence was probably 1/3 of the game. It makes us weary, as we think it is the end, but it gets prolonged over and over again.

My Backlog Files

Still a long list to play...

other than the fractional games/chinese room arc, i've played admittedly very few horror-genre walking sims, but i liked this ok for the most part. The protagonist here has a pretty good character development that at the very least, makes it interesting to be him and relive his trauma (it plays out a bit like Max Payne for lack of better comparison. The story is a mix of good and bad but it had a pretty nice climax and end. ( Found I was able to enjoy the story/character/concept a whole lot more than SOMA... Fight me!)

the real trouble in this game is that they could have just not made reference to blair witch and just called in 'crazy dude gets lost in the woods simulator' because that's what it is. If you've ever been lost in the woods you know it's pretty annoying and yes it can get scary. the game has a bit of fluff here and there (the erickson/nokia era phone was kinda neat and actually the first thing i did in the game was play with it) and a lot of things dont seem to really be that integral to the game. the dog idea however, was pretty neat. the way you interact with the dog in this game is way better than most games that have pets or companions. however this isnt the core of the game

CRAZY DUDE LOST IN THE WOODS SIMULATOR the core game experience is getting lost and getting unlost, and the way this works is basically meandering into a new area, triggering some kind of event or finding an item based puzzle (these at times get into the way). the game almost feels like this obtuse version of simon says where its waiting for you to do something but you dont know what... it can be a simple thing that you just missed and arent seeing. to make it more confusing the game will cleverly 'reroute you back' to where you were, putting you in a loop until you do what you must. the game also will mess with you be changing things behind your back, sometimes its putting objects down where they werent before (hence its not likely you will look for them there) or sealing off parts of the map and oepning up new ones. The game even at one point 'mocks you' for doing at it's told in a breaking the fourth wall fashion. Stuff like this is a bit common and all goes with the 'crazy dude' part in the title. While a lot of these things do add to the character and the experience, it doesnt exactly translate into the best kinda game idea.

Still FWIW it's a game at times that has some of it's own merits in terms of design and gameplay, and explores horror in ways that is unsettling and really disturbing and delivers a bit more than occasional jumpscares. Was more than I expected.