Bloober Team’s Blair Witch Never Really Hit Its Stride
My love affair with Bloober Team, the one-of-a-kind studio behind 2019’s Layers of Fear 2 and Blair Witch began when I played the original Layers of Fear with my best friend back in 2016.
Although we missed fairly obvious story beats in the opening hours we became completely enamoured with the studio’s talent in making a game’s setting completely mirror the playable character’s psyche. The house you explore in Layers of Fear is an all-encompassing shell that traps the player inside the mind of the character. Combined with horror gameplay, this has huge implications. I can’t remember a moment while we played that game when I wasn’t on the edge of my seat, constantly worried about what awful memory the character had that would terrify us next.
Naturally, I was so excited to hear that Bloober would be coming out with not one, but two games in 2019. Horror games have desperately needed a shake-up in the last five years and after building on the potential of their previous work I had no doubt that they had some truly horrifying experiences on the way.
Despite one of these games being the sequel to Layers of Fear, I found myself more attracted to the studio’s second title of the year, Blair Witch. Layers was often criticised for being “just a walking simulator” but Blair Witch would have added gameplay elements like a dog and certain useable items to keep things interesting. Further, it promised a more terrifying setting than the Layers of Fear games - a deep, dark forest that’s haunted by an ancient witch. Moreover, it boasted an IP that had a famed place in horror history. While the Blair Witch films may have failed to capitalise on how great a premise it is, maybe a game would be better suited to fulfill its scary potential. Because of all this, I had high hopes about how good a game Blair Witch could turn out to be.
I set off into the woods as protagonist Ellis with my trusty sidekick and good boy, Bullet at my side. Our goal was to find a child who had gone missing in the great expanse of the forest. I knew that taking my first step past the line of towering pines would be a larger step than it seemed. Where would the path take me, and what horrors would meet me after the sun had set through the trees?
The whole experience was dripping with potential.
I went down various branching pathways, all the while petting, and never reprimanding Bullet. He used his keen sense of smell to lead us to clues. As I began walking down a third branching path I began to wonder if I’d ever see where the other paths led, and if I could go back and explore them later on. I thought about how great a game it would be if it allowed me to get lost of my own accord and let the story unfold as Bullet and I found more clues. I thought about what a harrowing experience it would be to be lost in a seemingly endless forest with nothing but some clues and my own fears to torment me.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t how it turned out.
My mistake was failing to remember why Bloober Team was so brilliant when making Layers of Fear. They used linear design to control the player through various ebbs and flows in tension and used the controlled environment of a house that didn’t allow for too much exploration. This allowed them to tell a story while keeping the player totally exhilarated and engaged at the same time.
Blair Witch had already failed to follow its predecessor's guidelines. It was using a setting that encouraged and even begged for open exploration, with gameplay elements that suited player freedom. All the while, they were still trying to keep the player on rails so they could tell a story. This didn’t work though, because their signposting toward where you were supposed to go and what you were supposed to look at was never very effective.
This mismatch was the central issue with the first two-thirds of Blair Witch. When I wanted to follow a trail with Bullet to see what dark corners of the woods I might be led to, I wasn’t allowed to. Invisible walls and fallen debris were rife as they culled my every attempt to get lost. When I thought I had finally been left to my own devices, I would find the forest looping back on itself to say “nope, you missed something important, try this area again.”
In the end, I was never left to be scared of my own thoughts because the game was constantly asking me to read the thoughts of the developers.
Even Bullet started to get bored when I asked him to “seek” for something. He’d sniff the ground for a few moments and Ellis would say “Nothing, huh boy?” Apparently this interesting new gameplay mechanic Bloober was trying was really just a plot device that would only find things and lead me places when the story required it.
The final portion of the game found Ellis going into a house in the middle of the forest’s maze. “Finally”, I thought, “the studio has realised that a more linear setting is where their strengths lie.” The anticipation stirred up in me again. I felt my heart beating slightly quicker, and I shifted forward in my seat. I began walking through the abandoned wreck of the house, feeling discomfort at its mouldy walls and dark rooms.
Using my trusty camera (not dog), I followed trails only visible through night vision. I went down to the basement and into corners containing nothing. I turned around and remembered one of my favourite design elements from 2016. Suddenly, the room was different, and a new trail led me through new dark corridors. I would run into demons who I wouldn’t be allowed to look at or else they’d attack me and in a shocking turn of events, I was actually scared while playing the game. Hearing the demons breathe down my neck while I crept past them was horrible.
Although I was enjoying the torturous loops of the house, I began to be conscious of how much time I’d spent inside it. The story had been building to an important final climax when I entered, but more than forty-five minutes had now passed and the game still wasn’t over. I felt the loops start to drag. Instead of wrapping things up, the house began running me through Ellis’ traumatising past to remind me of what the game had been nailing into my head for over 5 hours — that Ellis had had a traumatising past.
The loops continued, and the demons became more frustrating as they stepped into whatever direction the trails led me in. The story beats kept repeating, and the studio began to make me feel like a child who didn’t understand any kind of subtlety. The game had finally found a setting that would let its linear gameplay become as scary as it had wanted to be, but by the time it did, the story made it feel dragged out for far longer than it should have.
The game finally ended. Ellis’ psyche had been explored beyond belief, and from a writing point of view, I could understand his fear. The character had been left alone to his thoughts in the woods and had completely crumbled. It’s just a shame that I wasn’t allowed to do the same.
Somewhere in that maze of a forest lies a branching pathway to two amazing games. Down one path, Bloober’s incredible ability to explore a character’s psyche could have led them to a fantastic first-person, narrative-driven game. Down the other pathway is a game that abandons that mind-bending story-telling but stays true to the studio’s horror ambitions. When Bloober tried to combine the two, they couldn’t see the forest for the trees. The game never really became scary, and the answers to its story’s mysteries were so obvious that I could see them even in the pitch-black woods.
Blair Witch never really hit its stride, but my love affair with Bloober Team continues, and I’m eagerly awaiting their next game. I just hope they take one of those pathways instead of trying to take both.
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If you’d like to watch Olly and I play through the original Layers of Fear, or you’d like to see our more recent video essays click here!
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