The new Blair Witch game (opens in new tab) from Bloober Team is ready to revive your fear of dark forests and abandoned houses, and the new trailer hints that its hero, Ellis, has a pretty scary past too. We see flashbacks, hallucinations, and there’s ominous talk of “sins we choose to forget.”
Ellis is a former police officer who’s heading into the supposedly cursed Black Hills Forest near Burkittsville, Maryland to help in the search for a missing child. Alone but for his loyal companion Bullet the dog, he’ll have to face the witch’s minions and his own past to survive.
“Ellis is an ex-cop and he has a troubled past, and exploring this past is a very important part of Blair Witch,” the game’s narrative designer Barbara Kciuk told GamesRadar in a recent interview (opens in new tab).
“In Blair Witch this is one of the things we’re using as the premise, his past. We really wanted to explore what can break a person and how it can be used against them.”
Bloober Team – a Polish indie studio – has plenty of experience with psychological horror. It gave us artistic nightmares with Layers of Fear and Layers of Fear 2, and did cyberpunk with 2017’s Observer. The studio worked closely with Lionsgate on bringing the Blair Witch to games.
Blair Witch will be released on Xbox One and PC on August 30, and you can expect to see more gameplay from Gamescom this week.
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