#73: Blair Witch Volume II: The Legend of Coffin Rock

Blair Witch Volume II: The Legend of Coffin Rock

Human Head Studios
Initial release: October 25, 2000
Platform: PC

images c/o MobyGames

Blair Witch is a frustrating franchise, isn't it? There's a lot of potential to the idea, but the the films are mostly commercials for a wide array of side material that… kinda mostly isn’t great. Part of the multimedia blitz around the release of the original film — one of the first of its kind — was a trio of survival horror games for the PC, developed under the auspices of the Gathering of Developers auteur publishing house. When Gathering of Developers got the Blair Witch license, they farmed it out to three separate studios, all assigned to work on a Blair Witch title to be released around Halloween 2000. While on paper it sounded like a great idea to really expand on the lore, in practice it was a shameless cash grab that really hurt what might have been a great sub-franchise. By all accounts, Terminal Reality knocked it out of the park with the first Blair Witch game (even tying it in with the setting of their sleeper hit Nocturne, with which it shared an engine.) But they weren’t the only ones doing Blair Witch games, and that may have been the problem. We already know how badly Ritual screwed the pooch on Blair Witch Volume III: The Elly Kedward Tale, but while Blair Witch Volume II does a lot of things better, it’s still a hot mess, and the things Volume III did well, Volume II did worse.

The voice acting for example is pretty bad. It's not quite original-Resident Evil bad, but definitely bad. While the overall storyline isn’t as eye-rollingly brain-dead as Blair Witch Volume III, it’s also extremely short, the kind of thing you could sum up in a single tweet. Here, I went into my old abandoned Twitter account to prove it:

 

The entire game will only take you about 4–5 hours of play. The story switches between 1863 and 1886, usually when the plot reaches a dead end. I realize that there isn’t much in Blair Witch lore to go on, but there’s just barely anything to the story to make the clunky gameplay worth it.

Oh and that’s another thing: the controls are ass. While Blair Witch Volume II doesn’t use as many keys as Volume III, the basics of combat are just awful, with an autoaim that doesn’t really work and when you’re being swarmed you’re often sticking your arm through enemies, thus shooting behind them. The game is also fairly stingy with healing items, and given how clunky the combat is you’re likely to be pretty low on health by the time you get to the final boss. (Oh, and much like Volume III, there’s a load of eye-rolling villain dialogue to waste everyone’s time.) I get that survival horror games require careful resource management but there’s definitely a question of how stingy is too stingy. Fortunately, there’s easily-enterable cheat codes to get you through tough spots. This game isn’t worth trying to tough out.

Say what you will about Resident Evil or Silent Hill, at least you can fucking shoot things. While Volume II uses pre-rendered backgrounds, much like Resident Evil in its early days, they’re quite ugly, and sometimes the engine gets confused and displays a screen you’re not even in, and only a reload will fix it. The lighting engine is pretty nice, though, for 2000, but other than a few key scenes, it does little to elevate the graphics. While character models are overall better than most PC games from the turn of the millennium, there’s a flowing fabric engine that never turns off, giving an odd look.

I know there’s a Blair Witch fandom out there. A friend of mine is a fan, but beyond that one friend, I’ve never seen it; it’s as if the franchise has otherwise died alone and forgotten. With titles like Blair Witch Volume II, and that awful new one from Bloober Team being by all accounts a boring mess that can’t even disappoint because it’s Bloober Team we’re talking about, perhaps it’s for the best that the franchise is moribund.

-june❤