

… A year later their footage was found.” What followed was spliced-together bits of shaky Hi8 video and black-and-white 16mm film footage from the wilderness, punctuated by the three students’ increasingly paranoid arguments, desperate screams, and, eventually, their demise. It opened with a prologue that read: “In October of 1994 three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary. It was a typically chilly night in Park City, Utah, where Hochman was covering the Sundance Film Festival for Entertainment Weekly, and the movie he’d just watched was unlike anything he’d ever seen before. That’s what David Hochman told himself on January 24, 1999, after a midnight showing of a little indie film called The Blair Witch Project. The Blair Witch Project was a film that divided audiences like no other.Avoid the twigs. One half were on the edge of their seats the whole time, the other half wondered why everyone was getting worked up over the shake-o-vision camera work and the fact that you never actually saw anything. The idea that there would be a game to follow up the film's success was inevitable. Exactly what you would do in this game was not. Let's face it, Blair Witch could have been a FPS, RTS, RPG and just about any other acronym you could think of. It turned out to be an 'action/adventure', which completely buggered its chances with the gaming cognoscenti. The game is set in the one-horse town of Burkitsville, where all the atrocities took place in the film. You play Elspeth 'Doc' Holliday, a member of Spookhouse a top-secret government agency set up to track spooky things (yes, the very same organization featured in Nocturne: expect obligatory appearances from familiar characters like the "Stranger"). You have been sent in to investigate the murder of seven children by one Rustin Parr, a loner who lives in the forest by town, which is said by local folklore to be haunted by the Blair Witch, who possessed Parr and forced him to murder the children. Naturally, anything relating to murders, rituals, witches and ancient evil is going to be popular, and many fans of the film are going to rush out and buy the game no matter what it's like.which would probably be a mistake. If the film confused you, then you don't stand a chance with the game.

You'd think the intro would tell you what's going on: Who you are and what you're doing.
