Blair Witch Volume 1: Rustin Parr
- November 24, 2000 14:47 PM PST
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The Blair Witch lives! Gathering of Developers stands ready to revamp last year's spookiest pop culture event with a trilogy of games.
The 1999 film phenomenon, The Blair Witch Project, left half of the audience scared out of their wits and the other half cursing as they reached for the Dramamine. When Gathering of Developers announced they'd secured the license for not one but three separate games, the obvious question was, how on earth are they going to keep us interested that long in what was essentially a flash-in-the-pan indie hit?The answer, of course, is the depth of the universe created behind the movie. All that backwoods folklore is a perfect breeding ground for more eerie drama. Terminal Reality is skillfully tying in not only the engine from its action game Nocturne, but its own universe as well. In the first episode of the trilogy, Spookhouse (Nocturne's government agency that handles bizarre phenomena) sends out agent Doc Holliday to investigate Rustin Parr's claims that ghosts made him kill all those children in the 1940s. Unfortunately, Holliday arrives on the scene a day after Parr's execution and just a few hours after his house is burnt to a crisp, so she won't have much to go on.
Keeping the movie's sense of dread without showing actual monsters is, well, impossible. There will be some monsters to shoot--Holliday packs the same laser-sighted pistols as her Nocturne predecessor, and she's blown a few stickmen to splinters--but most of the emphasis is on the creepy atmosphere. You'll see shadows pass over a room, but when you turn to look, nothing's there. There will also be some important tie-ins that help explain the events of the movie...to a point. Suffice it to say that you haven't seen the last of Mike, Heather, and Josh...
