The Blair Witch Project was a low-budget indie movie that captured something horrifying a couple of decades ago: the feeling of getting lost in the woods. And Blair Witch, a new video game from Lionsgate and Bloober Team (maker of Layers of Fear), re-creates that feeling in an interactive horror game.
In the original movie, the characters kept retreading old ground in the fictional Black Hills Forest near Burkittsville, Maryland. They circled back and had no idea they were stomping on their own footprints.
With the game, you don’t have that problem in part because you have a dog. Your trusted canine can sniff out both natural and supernatural elements in the terrain. But you have tougher problems to deal with in the game, as demons controlled by the witch are actively trying to attack you rather than merely messing with your mind.
I played part of the game at a demo in San Francisco, and I interviewed Barbara Kciuk, a writer for the game at Bloober. Here’s video of the game’s beginning as well as some of the later scenes culminating with a terrifying experience at the house from the film.
The game debuts on August 30 on the Windows PC and the Xbox One.