It's probably the best set piece in the game. Don't get me wrong: there's a lot of good content in that final level. So when you get to the final level, it just kind of goes on for way too long because it has to bounce between all these disparate plot threads. The final level kind of dragged because it had to wrap up so many loose plot threads.īloober keeps jumping between the disgraced cop angle, the disgraced soldier angle, the strained romance angle, and the mental illness angle, and never really seems to bring it all together. And unfortunately, none of us were really able to think much about how successfully the game had played us because we were too busy trying to make sense of all the disparate plot threads. The game was successful at conditioning us. However, this point was diminished, as my friends and I walked out of the game not even realizing that we could have done anything differently - let alone what those things were.
The Blair Witch didn't only manipulate Ellis she manipulated me. The problem is that the narrative themes muddy the ludic point.Īs an aside, this is also the game's best realization of the the concepts of the Blair Witch IP: it's meta nature. This ludic theme is tightly integrated into gameplay. Everybody is just following someone else's orders. That idea of being conditioned to blindly follow the orders of the Blair Witch is one of the game's most clever ludic concepts. This game conditions you to act outside of your own interests, simply because you are told what to do.
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Being told by Carver how to avoid the monsters later in the game conditions you to follow Carver's instructions. Being told how to defeat the monsters, and then being forced to protect yourself from them, conditions you to shine your light at monsters. The military and Blair Witch threads could have been united with the theme of following orders.Īll that time you spend wandering the looping paths in the woods, looking for anything that will end the loop, conditions you to do whatever is necessary to progress the game. The whole game would be tightly themed around this idea of personal responsibility when under orders. Then, the game could play on the player's sense of agency and responsibility when it comes time for the player to chose to follow or reject the commands given to you by Carver and/or the Blair Witch. Now, we don't even need the disgraced cop sub-plot, but we don't lose any of the narrative beats.Īnd heck, did a game that was almost entirely about post-traumatic stress disorder even need to include the secret guilt? Let alone three different secret guilts? Couldn't the PTSD from the war have been enough? The sheriff could be another former squadmate from the war, and maybe he had to reject Ellis' application for the police force because he knew the PTSD made Ellis unstable. Instead of Pete being the younger brother of the kid Ellis shot when he was a cop, they could drop the cop sub-plot, and Pete could have been the younger brother (or son) of one of Ellis' squadmates who died in the ambush. Maybe he was ordered to lead his men into the ambush, even though he did not feel that it was safe.
For example, had they chosen to stick with the "I lead my army buddies into an ambush" backstory, then they could have written the entire game around the idea of "I was just following orders". Personally, I think Bloober should have probably picked one or two of these plot ideas, dropped the others, and shortened the final level accordingly. This is a really cool idea that is understated by the game, and probably sadly missed by many players. Unless you figured out how to get a "good" ending (which is mostly relegated to repeat playthroughs), then the game (and the witch) succeeded at conditioning you to follow her commands. The real twist is that the game (and by extension, the Blair Witch) has been trying to manipulate you all along. None of these are the actual twist of the game. And the fact that it's just too much happening says nothing about how unfortunately pessimistic and nihilistic the game is regarding mental health. So Ellis may retroactively be the kidnapper and killer all along?Īll this in a four-or-six-hour game. That just comes out of nowhere, and the entire "dead ex-wife" thing is a complete red herring.Īnd if all that weren't enough, the time and space-bending properties of the cam-corder suggest throughout most of the game that Carver may in fact be a version of Ellis from the future. Oh, and Carver may in fact be Ellis' future self.Īt the very end of the game, it turns out that the face of a dying woman we keep seeing is not in fact Jess', but rather a pregnant Muslim woman who Ellis kills while trying to escape the ambush.
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