Blair Witch trailer shows completely safe and normal forest

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Apart from the hanging icons. And that evil house.

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.

Tom Senior
Tom Senior

Part of the UK team, Tom was with PC Gamer at the very beginning of the website's launch—first as a news writer, and then as online editor until his departure in 2020. His specialties are strategy games, action RPGs, hack ‘n slash games, digital card games… basically anything that he can fit on a hard drive. His final boss form is Deckard Cain.