See new footage of the forthcoming Blair Witch game

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.

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.