Horror cinema is blessed with tons of visually iconic monsters: the Xenomorph, the Thing, the Brundlefly. And then there’s the Blair Witch. Never so much as a blur on screen, at least in the one film that counts, she exists only in the sounds of a branch snapping in the distance. The one visual we have is a stand-in, those little twig effigies which Blair Witch—the videogame, sans ‘Project’—distributes liberally through its woods. You can even get an Achievement for finding enough of them.

It’s an inevitability, perhaps, of adapting this source material into a game, that developer Bloober Team had to expand beyond the main activities seen in the film: mostly just getting lost, arguing and screaming. But to its credit, Blair Witch resists many of the obvious traps. The game keeps the UI and the explanations to a minimum, it’s never tempted to hand you a gun to defend yourself, and it waits a good long time before any definable monsters do appear.

At the outset, you’re just Ellis, an ex-cop deciding to join a search party for a kid who got lost in those infamous woods near Burkittsville, Maryland. It's 1996, a couple of years after the events of The Blair Witch Project, and characters allude to those film students who went missing, but the game keeps a light touch.

It doesn’t need to say much more, because the woods themselves make it clear that something’s not right. There’s a moment in the movie where a character admits to kicking their map into a creek because it was useless—and this, at least, the game adapts incredibly faithfully. There were moments I wasn’t sure if I’d gone the wrong way, or if the game had reworked its level geometry while I wasn’t looking. 

Being lost in the woods is creepy, for a while at least, but it can start to grate the fifth time you pass the same spot. To keep that horror-movie atmosphere, Blair Witch is very low on UI, which often results in me feeling directionless rather than scared.

Here to help you find your way is Bullet, a German shepherd who will surely be remembered as this game’s breakout star. Bullet is a Good Dog, but he’s also a good dog—one brought to convincing life thanks to a wealth of incidental animations that’ll bring out the protective dog-parent in you, as Bullet suddenly stops to crouch down and scratch at one ear, or stiffens as he relieves himself on a patch of grass.

Yes, Blair Witch meets that most important of modern videogame metrics: you can pet the dog. In fact, there’s an entire wheel of commands you can give to Bullet. If you lose sight of him, tap the button to call him back, and he’ll immediately canter over to you—which, speaking as a dog owner, is a comforting fantasy in the midst of all this horror. Hold it down, and you can instruct him to stay, or sniff out a clue. Early on, this lets Bullet work as a diegetic replacement for UI, a sort of joyfully bounding waypoint marker, but later in the game, asking him to ‘seek’ and nothing happening becomes a frustratingly common experience.

Eventually, ‘here’ is the only command you’ll actually use. Another option is ‘reprimand’, which obviously I never touched. I’m not the monster here. No, the real monster is those spindly-limbed creatures that keep popping up behind the trees.

Witch hunt

At first you just catch glimpses. A blur of movement, something that could be an arm or could be a branch. The kind of thing you see at the edge of your vision when you haven’t been sleeping properly. It’s unsettling, if not outright scary.

But then the game forces you into what can only be described—with a reluctant sigh—as combat encounters. You might not have a gun, but you do have the flickering beam of your light. You desperately scan the woods trying to catch the creature like a rabbit in a single wavering headlight. It never really develops beyond ‘flick the mouse in the direction Bullet is currently facing’, but it makes for a tense, if ill-explained, first encounter. I died twice at that point, which had the effect of making this mysterious threat into something definable. By the time I saw my second or third, it was just another videogame enemy to defeat.

The same goes for the other main type of monster, something seen only by the cloud of leaves it throws up from the undergrowth. It’s an evocative sight—until you’ve had to sprint through a field with a dozen of them in it, dashing from one bit of contrived cover to the next. It’s like flicking on the light to discover that horrifying silhouette looming over your bed was just a coat stand all along.

These threats are enclosed to certain spaces, meaning that getting lost in the woods stops being scary—you never feel pursued, the way you do in Alien: Isolation or when Mr X pops up in Resident Evil 2. For a game of this length, keeping the monster permanently off-screen was never really going to be an option, but Blair Witch fails to find a convincing alternative.

Things didn't go well for the documentary crew who explored Blair Witch's woods in the 1999 film, but they weren't a cop, and they didn't have a cop dog called Bullet by their side. The game has you investigating the disappearance of a young boy in the same region where the Blair Witch is rumoured to hunt. I'm sure the kid's just fine.

That's the set up for the new Blair Witch game, which comes from the team that made pretty-but-flawed horror game Layers of Fear and Observer. The game challenges you to pit "YOUR SANITY AGAINST HER CURSE" because your fictional cop character is a man "burdened by his past", as fictional police officers tend to be. With Bullet by your side, I'm not really sure what could go wrong.

The trailer above is just a mood piece, but a good one. For some reason I expected more film grain and a home-brewed look to evoke the low-tech, improvised feel of the original film, but the film's iconography is there, in that extraordinarily creepy white house and the hanging twig symbols.

The game will be influenced by the "cinematic lore" of the films. Hopefully that's just the first one, and not Book of Shadows or the 2016 Blair Witch. A PCG staffer who shall go unnamed reckons the second film is decent—a take so searingly hot it brought an international conference call to a halt.

Blair Witch is out in a few weeks, on August 30. H/T to VG247.

Layers of Fear developer Bloober Team is taking us back to Blair Witch's horrible woods next month, but you can get a taste of some of the scares now with the official gameplay trailer, above. It's not as dense as the Blair Witch footage we saw last week, but it does get quite a bit weirder. 

Like last week's footage, there's some traipsing around the woods with a handy canine companion, Bullet, but it's not just a nature hike. There's weird stuff going down in the woods—dilapidated houses to investigate, found footage to freak out over and, of course, monsters. 

In the trailer's last sequence, Blair Witch really starts to look like a Bloober Team game. An old building that seems to have a life of its own is more than a bit evocative of Layers of Fear. The first Blair Witch movie—don't ask me to remember the others—was a slow burner that would have been pretty dull without the extremely clever found footage conceit, so I'm down for this mind-bending take on the series. 

I don't know if I fancy a horror game with a dog in it, though. I don't want to keep seeing a pooch in peril. Hopefully I'll be able to get him to stay outside while I explore obviously haunted houses. But what if one of the monsters in the woods gets him while I'm rummaging around in cupboards? I'm already getting stressed. 

Blair Witch is due out on August 30. 

Here's a look at the new Blair Witch game, which comes to us courtesy of Game Informer's Gameplay Today series rather than a collection of found footage on a haunted videotape. You can't have everything.

Announced during Microsoft's E3 conference this year, Blair Witch is being made by Bloober Team, who were responsible for the Layers of Fear series and Observer. There's even a reference to Observer's cyborg killer at 1.34 in the video above. 

This new footage mostly shows off the dog who will be accompanying you into Black Hills Forest in search of a missing boy. The dog's named Bullet, and there's a whole wheel of interactions you can have with him, yes, including patting. He also goes places you can't, barks at items and monsters, and helps solve puzzles. Bullet seems like a Very Good Boy but he is absolutely going to pop up out of the darkness at some point and scare the shit out of me.

This will be the first Bloober game to feature combat, and there's a little of that in the video as well. The Blair Witch has minions, blurry twiggy creatures who circle around you while Bullet barks in their direction. They can be burned by shining your torch on them, a bit like in Alan Wake.

There's a camcorder too, and a walkie-talkie you can use to keep in touch with the rest of the search party, but which the witch can also use to mess with you. Sounds creepy.

Blair Witch will be available from Steam and GOG on August 30. Let's hope it's better than the previous Blair Witch games, which were memorably summed up in Richard Cobbett's Crapshoot column.