Blair Witch Reviews
If you don't mind a quite predictable story and a few flaws, you'll find in Blair Witch a very effective way to spend your evenings in total fear with a lovely dog and some good game mechanics to help you.
Review in French | Read full review
Blair Witch might just become one of the most satisfying psychological horror experiences on consoles. Despite the protagonist's weak story, the context and sound design in the game turn into a unique experience.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
Blair Witch makes a valiant effort to revive the franchise, and while it won't generate the hype of the 1999 film, it's a worthwhile horror title despite some flaws discussed above.
Blair Witch brings the horror, but several gameplay and visual bugs drag down an otherwise scary walk through the woods.
If you're into this genre or if you're a Blair Witch fan, you should check this one out, but it doesn't offer much to other players.
Review in Turkish | Read full review
If you are looking for something to whet your horror appetite, and you only have a Switch, then you can’t go wrong with Blair Switch. However, if you have an Xbox, PC or PS4, then you’re better off experiencing it on something with a bit more technical capability.
What the game does borrow from, and contribute to, the Blair Witch mythos is exactly what made the movie such an effective piece of horror. For the overwhelming majority of it, there are no jump scares or cheap tricks. What you get instead is the terrifying sensation of being very lost, and very hunted in a forest that seemingly gets darker by the second, as you slowly start to question Ellis’ (and your own) sanity. For psychological horror fans like me, that alone is worth the price of admission. For video game fans, well, I’ll leave that to the experts.
Blair Witch: Oculus Quest Edition is a bit of an enigma. The use of VR adds so much in terms of tension, immersion and interactivity, that makes it feels both awesome and terrifying. Then, the removal of certain sections and the addition of very basic scares makes it feel a bit rushed as the scares don’t really pay off from the tension that’d been building. It’s only really the crazy ending that feels truly spooky while the simplistic wandering through the woods picking stuff up feels like a limited experience. If you’ve never played the original Flat version, I still think that’s the best version to play, but it’s worth jumping into the VR edition if you’re a fan of immersive psychological horror games or the original release and want to experience some of the thrills up close and personal. Bonus: You can pet Bullet in VR – so if all else fails, at least the game has that.
As a regular game, this title would likely have underwhelmed me somewhat with its basic gameplay and simplistic puzzle-exploration nature. The story is intriguing and hits its stride in the second half, but follows some usual tropes, doesn’t land all of its more complex themes and is relatively predictable. As a VR title though, the atmosphere of the forest, the foreboding sense of dread and the feeling of unease is ever present and amplified from the immersion of the headset and excellent audio design. It’s a great experience in VR and worth having a go with if you love all things horror or psychological thriller, just don’t expect to be scared to death or for anything deep gameplay-wise.
Blair Witch may not be the scariest game out there but the developers have crafted an atmospheric forest that feels true to the lore as well as a solid enough if not poorly paced storyline combined with some solid gameplay mechanics and perhaps the best choice they could have made, the inclusion of Bullet as an integral part of both navigation and combat.
Blair Witch makes you feel desperately lost in the forest at times, while giving you a new story in the series. It starts out well with a good tension, but this dims down a bit later on. Luckily only to build up to a scary ending. A good game to play in between the blockbusters of the fall.
Review in Dutch | Read full review
The long and short of Blair Witch comes down to how much you're willing to invest. If the journey means more than the destination, you can actually find a fair amount of joy in this adventure. It's just those looking for a simpler experience or possibly more interesting things than watching a video and having something weird happen, followed by some dialogue about how weird that was. So, unless you really want to explore the woods in hopes of scares, this is one adventure you can probably skip out on.
Blair Witch is an improvement over Bloober Team’s past work and I hope to see them further explore more game mechanics in their titles. Even though they’re good at perception-altering visuals, I want to see them branch out more and more. I think that one day in the future, Bloober Team could release a truly knockout horror game.
What remains is still a game with a good atmosphere, which perfectly embodies - at least in the first part - the spirit of cinematographic films, also thanks to some clever and exquisite workmanship.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Blair Witch is a bit of a mixed bag. The graphics, sound design, and unique gameplay elements are all really cool, but the lack of a solid story and never truly taking advantage of being a horror property hold it back. Fans of the film franchise will no doubt find something to like here, but it’s not the interactive horror experience it could’ve been.
Bloober Team tries to mix successful elements from titles like Alan Wake and Outlast, and use the atmosphere and theme from The Blair Witch Project to create a different horror game. But the result is not as good as expected, as the game starts to get boring soon and has no true identity, with the opportunity to roam the Burkittsvills forest being the only salvage point.
Review in Persian | Read full review
Blair Witch has some issues but I do think it is worth playing at some point.
Blair Witch is certainly a game worth checking out. Despite a less-than-stellar story, it has a few interesting gameplay ideas and a genuinely creepy atmosphere that few horror games manage to pull off effectively. At a little over five hours long, it is an experience you can go through multiple times. But it’s also a title that I would recommend playing on another platform if possible. Although there are some positive aspects that are exclusive to the Switch version, these are heavily outweighed by the limitations that come with the hardware in the portable console.
I’m fairly disappointed Blair Witch: VR Edition. Yes, it is definitely more immersive than Blair Witch, but a lot of that immersion is frequently broken by the horrendous pop-ins, clunky controls, and ridiculously short chapters. Regardless of playing it on hardware that is definitely showing its age, that still doesn’t stop the game from being boring most of the time.
A fine take on psychological horror cut down by bugs and wonkiness.