Blair Witch review: getting hopelessly lost never felt more apt

I can’t say I was surprised, and in fact it felt thematically apt, to be hopelessly lost in the woods at night during a Blair Witch VR experience. A degree of aimlessness and confusion is baked into the premise, the original source material of course being the smash-hit indie horror movie from 1999, following doomed film students who go missing while camping and become snacks for a cranky witch. Getting hopelessly disoriented is narratively justified, but boy does Blair Witch: VR Edition (a port of a computer and console game) push it. There were times when I felt so frustratingly out-of-joint I wanted to rip my headset off and throw it through the window.  

Whereas the first production is a found footage film, with jerky handheld sequences revealing the final moments in  the characters’ lives, here we ourselves get lost, and we are the person who finds the footage—not of the original trio but of camcorder recordings related to the whereabouts of a missing boy. The person we inhabit is a PTSD-addled police officer, Ellis Lynch (voiced by Joseph May), who joins the hunt for the youngster in the Black Hills forrests, only for him/us to get lost, muddled, and victimized by the malevolent spirit.

Blair Witch VR
Developer: Bloober Team
Release date: July 6, 2021
Experienced on: Meta Quest 2

Instead of a map or compass, the mechanic that helps guide us between locations is a German Shepherd named Bullet, who makes fumbling through the woods feel less lonely and is a memorable companion, with added benefits from a dev perspective—i.e. no need for dialogue trees. One time the pooch dropped the ball and didn’t help me find a pair of keys when he was supposed to; I eventually discovered this was a glitch in the game after consulting a playthrough video in desperation. Like many animal companions in video games, Bullet is reduced to a series of obvious functions—yet his constant presence does create a sense of camaraderie. 

The player locates a series of camcorder tapes that draw a strange synergy between the virtual world occupied and the footage depicted, as well as connecting the moment recorded to the moment in which it is watched, and the immediate future of the gameplay. Sound confusing? Let me unpack an example. A tape discovered early on contains footage of a toy police car with sirens, placed in a particular position at the campsite. Once you visit that spot the toy is now there, on the ground, triggering Ellis to comment aloud about how it wasn’t there before, a representative medium inside the narrative world impacting the contents of the world itself.

Sometimes Matryoshka dolls are invoked as visual metaphors to illustrate the tiering of realities, one inside another. Here the metaphor doesn’t work, because each reality is not subordinate, or belonging, to another; they are equal in cosmic dimensions, dislocated temporally and sometimes, as in the previous example, rejoined. 

Most interestingly, Blair Witch VR demonstrates how far screen mobilization and virtualization have come. The original film mobilized and virtualized the camera, turning its own recording device into a presentation mode. In Blair Witch VR our body is virtualized, and the camcorder exists both as a mediated form, presenting important information, as well as a small object in a much larger panoramic tableau. A film inside a film is meta. But a film—or a VR experience—inside a VR experience is just a logical part of a broader universe. Getting lost inside an experience about getting lost is experiential. And—returning to my original point—painfully apt.