Last year, Bloober Team and Lionsgate Games released Blair Witch, a first-person horror game set in the same universe as The Blair Witch found footage film series. While it had its fair share of flaws, Blair Witch was still one of the best things to ever come out of the franchise, with impressive graphics and an effectively creepy atmosphere. Now Blair Witch has made its way to the Oculus Quest with Blair Witch: Oculus Quest Edition, and unfortunately, this is clearly the inferior way to experience the game.

Whereas Blair Witch on home consoles has highly-detailed environments and generally impressive graphics, Blair Witch: Oculus Quest Edition is distractingly ugly, at least when played on an original Oculus Quest headset. While it likely looks a lot better when played on an Oculus Quest 2 headset, those thinking about picking it up for their standard Quest hardware may want to think twice. Many textures lack detail and some trees look like cardboard cutouts.

The bright side is that Blair Witch: Oculus Quest Edition wastes no time covering up its poor visuals. The game is seriously hard to look at when playing in the sections set during the daytime, so thankfully much of the experience takes place in the dark. Blair Witch: Oculus Quest Edition's night scenes hide the visual downgrade, and they also help the game achieve at least some of the creepy atmosphere from the original version.

Walking around the woods in pitch-black darkness, armed with little more than a flashlight is scary, and in some ways, the scares in Blair Witch: Oculus Quest Edition are enhanced by the virtual reality setup. Horror games and virtual reality have always paired well, and Blair Witch: Oculus Quest Edition proves that by using the technology to better immerse players in the experience. The VR is combined with positional audio to make players feel like the woods are really all around them, which the game pulls off with mostly successful results.

Unfortunately, Blair Witch: Oculus Quest Edition recycles sound effects a lot, to the point where it works against the game and breaks the immersion. Players will often hear the growl of the monsters that prowl the Black Hills forest, and at first, it will send a shiver down their spine. But when it becomes clear that the same exact growling sound is replaying every couple of minutes, it loses its impact.

Many things about Blair Witch: Oculus Quest Edition break the immersion, which in turn make it less scary. Besides the bad graphics and repetitive audio, one of the most immersion-breaking aspects of the game is the dog, Bullet, who is far dumber in this version of the game than he is in the console versions. In Blair Witch: Oculus Quest Edition, Bullet likes to run head-first into objects, clipping through them and never stopping until players call him away with a command.

Bullet's AI may not be as impressive in Blair Witch: Oculus Quest Edition, but otherwise, the developers put a lot of work into how players can interact with the dog. With the Oculus Touch controllers, players can pet Bullet, feed him treats, and have him smell things found in the woods. Players can also use a whistle to give Bullet more specific commands and interact with him in additional ways.

Blair Witch: Oculus Quest Edition's controls is one area that the game has nailed, as it's very easy to control in VR, with multiple movement options and everything operating as it should. Players are able to interact with more objects in the environment thanks to some new physics, and using the motion controls to do so can be fun. A lot of VR games like to bog things down with tutorials explaining how to do every little thing, but Blair Witch: Oculus Quest Edition leaves players to their own devices pretty much right away, which is greatly appreciated.

Where VR plays a role in the immersion-breaking, though, is with Blair Witch player character Ellis. If players look down, they will see their various tools floating in mid-air, as Ellis doesn't have a rendered body beyond his floating, Rayman-like hands. It's an absurd visual and hurts the game's immersion more than anything else, making it impossible to get as invested in the story as it is when playing the console version of the game.

Blair Witch: Oculus Quest Edition retains the story that was praised by many Blair Witch reviews last year, so that's a plus, but this is definitely not the best way to experience it. Besides the aforementioned issues with the game, Blair Witch: Oculus Quest Edition feels smaller, needing to load more frequently and breaking up the experience with chapter titles. Not only that, but if players start to stray too far off the beaten path, the game will simply shake the screen a bit and re-position them so that they are turned the other way.

But while Blair Witch: Oculus Quest Edition is not the ideal way to play the game, it's still a decent horror experience from a gameplay standpoint. Many of the puzzles and exploration elements are still here, and it can be fun to interact with the various objects in the game world. The camcorder gimmick, where players can bring objects from recorded footage into the game world, is still interesting and is enhanced by VR.

The graphical downgrade and lack of technical polish when compared to other versions of the game seriously hurts Blair Witch: Oculus Quest Edition, and the VR is not enough to justify playing this one over the others. The original Blair Witch is one of Bloober Team's more impressive games so far, and if someone wants to play a video game based on the Blair Witch movies, they're much better off playing it on home consoles/PC. That being said, if someone's only avenue of playing the game is on Oculus Quest, it's better than nothing.

Blair Witch: Oculus Quest Edition is out now for Oculus Quest and Quest 2. Game Rant was provided with an Oculus Quest code for this review.