The Blair Witch Project was touted as one of the scariest movies of its time and utilized an original indie set-up to help build the tension of the movie. The entire premise relied on an old VHS movie camera that contained footage of some teenagers being chased through the woods by some mysterious entity. Now, the same concept is being brought to the PC and Xbox.
In advance of its release on Friday, IGN got its hands on the first 11-minutes of gameplay for the new Blair Witch game. And the footage looks promising. The series will take place in the 1990s with the main character, a VHS camcorder, and your trusty dog Bullet having a look through the woods and the mysterious events surrounding the series.
The gameplay is pretty simple. Players will control the main character of the game by looking around with the camcorder and the flashlight, which makes Blair Witch more of an indie exploration than anything else.
But in order to interact with objects, the developers have included an innovation feature: the dog Bullet. Players can use a command wheel interface to give the dog commands. These commands will send the dog off running to dig, sniff, or explore an area while the character uses the camcorder and flashlight to look around.
Entering certain areas or uncovering certain items with Bullet will trigger further cutscenes and advance the storyline.
For those who are uninformed of the story behind the original Blair Witch Project, the movie follows three amateur filmmakers in 1994 who go out into the woods of Burkittsville, Maryland to investigate the Blair Witch urban legend. What they find is anything but a mere legend.
There they meet locals who tell them about a girl named Robin Weaver, who saw an old woman floating through the forest. The students hike to Coffin Rock, where five men were found murdered in an evil ritual in the 1800s. Later, one of the three goes missing and the remaining two find pieces of his bloody shirt, hair, and tongue in a bag left outside their camp. They also find ritualistic cairns build around their camping site.
They eventually track the missing filmmaker by following his screams to an eerie abandoned house with strange hand-prints on the walls. Their the footage ends after the two remaining members of the team are attacked by an invisible force.
If horror games are up your alley, be sure to check out Blair Witch on Friday for both Xbox and PC.
