Blair Witch: Oculus Quest Edition is the second horror VR adaptation from Bloober Team, transforming the studio’s 2019 adaptation of the famous found-footage horror movie into a heart-pounding virtual reality experience.
The original Blair Witch Project released 21 years ago to huge success and has since been adapted in Bloober’s 2019 game Blair Witch, which has now come to VR in Blair Witch: Oculus Quest Edition. In an interview with Game Rant, Bloober Team’s Narrative Designer Barbara Kciuk talked about transforming the feel of the movie into a game, and then into an experience for the Oculus Quest.
Tackling an IP as old and well-established as The Blair Witch Project can be an intimidating experience, but it also provides new opportunities. Kciuk talked about some of the most exciting aspects of the “legendary franchise” which drew the developers to the Black Hills as their next games’ setting. Many of the developers fell in love with the movie. The release of The Blair Witch Project wasn’t just a triumph in storytelling, but marketing as well, with many film-goers believing that the found footage was real and the actors involved not making press appearances until some time after the movie’s release.
While the original movie created much of its suspense through the limited view of the shaky hand-held cameras the three main characters used throughout the film, Blair Witch: Oculus Quest Edition was faced with a new challenge: bringing that same horror to life in a VR experience where players have more control over their movement, and what they’re seeing. Throughout Blair Witch: Oculus Quest Edition, players can find tapes and cameras that help them piece together the story. Tackling the player’s own perspective, however, was a challenge that Bloober Team had to tackle.
“In a movie, [the camera] helps to reduce the distance between the viewer and the character, but in a game, this distance is already minimal, as the player controls the character. So instead of replicating methods, we focused on replicating emotions those methods evoked.”
The focus on emotionally rather than literally recreating the experience of The Blair Witch Project was a key goal of the development team. The story begins 2 years after the events of the film, following Ellis Lynch as he ventures into the Black Hills to find a missing 9 year-old boy, with his dog Bullet as his only companion. Clearly, the emotion behind such an adventure is important in translating to players and across platforms.
The opportunity to work with the Blair Witch IP was a “match made in heaven,” according to Kciuk. Though the developers felt that the VR and movie experiences were very different, there was a similarity between the way the original movie had tried to create a sense of horror and suspense and the way Bloober Team had attempted to achieve the same goal in earlier games from the studio. In one of the studio’s early successes, 2016’s Layers of Fear, players take on the role of a disturbed painter unravelling old secrets while attempting to finish his masterpiece, which encouraged players to distrust their senses in a similar way to The Blair Witch Project.
Blair Witch: Oculus Quest Edition aims to replicate the emotions of the original film while removing the barrier between the player and the world of horror they’re experiencing. As players explore the haunted Black Hills in search of a missing boy, strange tape recordings, and mysterious shadowy figures, Bloober Team hopes it’ll be able to give players a “totally new, ultra-immersive experience.”
Blair Witch: Oculus Quest Edition is out now for Oculus Quest and Quest 2.