Bloober Team took everyone by surprise with their E3 announcement that they’d not only be creating a Blair Witch game for PC and Xbox One, but that they’d also be targeting August 30 for the release. That announcement didn’t exactly have a lot of meat to it, so in an interview with Eurogamer, writer Basia Kciuk and team developer Maciej Głomb sat down to do a little explaining.
According to Bloober, the project began about two years ago after the team had finished up Observer. The team was looking for a new project, and coincidentally, Lionsgate was looking for a company that would “transition…the Blair Witch cinematic universe to video games”.
With that, the Observer team was split into three, with one team focusing on Layers of Fear 2, the second team the Blair Witch game, and the third team focusing on a project “which [Bloober] can’t really talk about”.
As for what the game would be about, Kciuk stated that it was a complicated question. “So far, we focus more on the psychological layer of the story. With the original Blair Witch, there wasn’t so much of this psychological element. We observed how the characters are reacting but the film didn’t dwell on backstory. We got a great chance from Lionsgate to tell our own story. We both wanted this entrapment in a forest, this feeling of being alone, of being surrounded by something greater than you, something you can’t really fight with, and we wanted this psychological layer of the story.”
That being said, Lionsgate gave Bloober a lot of freedom with the game. “It’s not like, ‘Oh, the Blair Witch can do this, this and this.’ No. It’s like, ‘Blair Witch is this concept for us – work with it.’”
As for combat, the game will be similar in style to the mechanics of Alan Wake, but without guns. “It’s similar in the way you also have a flashlight, but in Alan Wake you have a flashlight and conventional weapons,” says Głomb. “You don’t have that here because it was not really fitting to the universe; you don’t really see anyone running with a shotgun around the Blair Witch forest. So your only weapon is a flashlight. It’s more of a way for you to get rid of the monsters, to escape them. You don’t really kill them, you fend them off.”
For inspiration, the team drew upon a variety of games. Slender Man was one inspiration, but due to the length of that game, it was only “for a moment”. “One we really liked, although it’s not a horror game, was Firewatch. It was a great adventure in a forest while being, technically, alone – you can talk with another person but otherwise you are alone out there. Although it was not scary, it was more of a mystery, it was great to look at the mechanisms, to look at the how the story unfolds, the pacing.”
The team also drew inspiration from Outlast and Silent Hills, but also films such as [REC] and Paranormal Activity.
When asked about other platforms, Głomb and Kciuk were reluctant to talk about PlayStation 4 and the Nintendo Switch. “For now, we are focusing on Xbox and PC but we will discuss the other platforms in the future,” says Głomb. That being said, there’s always the possibility of a later release. “The Switch version [of Layers of Fear and Observer] wasn’t released at the start but it came out finally, so it might be a similar situation here.”
