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.
