Blair Witch Barbara Kciuk Interview – Playing Mind Games with Bloober Team

Blair Witch previews have emerged from the Black Hills Forest now and I had the opportunity to play first hands-on with the game at a preview event a few weeks ago. Further thoughts on the demo can be found in a special episode of The VineCast featuring myself, Diego, and Samatha. We also had the chance to speak with Barbara Kciuk, Narrative Designer at Bloober Team to discuss the Blair Witch’s ambitious storytelling and what horror video game fans should be excited for in this original story based on a familiar universe.

How long have you been with the company?

For more than a year. A year and two months. 

When you started the Blair Witch Project was it the first game you worked on?

Yeah, at Bloober Team it was my first project we did together. I was there when it started. Not throughout all the process but I joined it when it was in very early stages. 

What attracted you about working on Blair Witch?

We’ve been working with Lionsgate for some time. We went through the library together to decide how could we work together on what project and we just saw Blair Witch and thought yes, this is amazing. In the end, Blair Witch is about messing with your head, that you don’t really know what’s going on. Like the very ending of the game its…what just happened? It just leaves you with this feeling of not really understanding and yet being so terrified of it. This messing with player’s heads is something we do in our games, in Layers of Fear and Observer. We were always trying to change the environment to make you really question what you just saw. 

With Bloober Team’s games, it’s atmospheric but also playing that mind game, psychology aspect and so with narrative design, how much did you work with Lionsgate and did they tell you what you can and can’t do? How much freedom did you have?

We worked a lot with them. There is really big cooperation. There’s a mutual discussion at all times and all respects. At the same time, they don’t really tell us “no don’t do that or do that.” Because they’re great. They gave us a lot of creative freedom and we are ambitious because we really want to create this world in a way that seems natural for it. We are expanding some ideas but in the end, it would break the immersion if we entered something that does not fit in that universe. So we are doing this really carefully, we are thinking of what fits and what doesn’t fit in this universe. We are constantly talking with Lionsgate, what they did before, what works for them, what ideas they had and what ideas we have and what we think would be the best. It’s a constant discussion about how can we make it better.

When you’re creating the game, what’s your process from starting a draft to having it within the game? 

Being a game designer often means killing your babies. You really have some ideas and they are amazing ideas when on paper but it often doesn’t work in a game and something that doesn’t work on paper, can actually be amazing in a game. I talked before that one medium doesn’t necessarily translate to each other. You need to think about what you want to do, what themes you want to convey, and then mess around with it. You need to figure out what would be the best way to really give the player the experience you want them to have. 

So you go through iterations?

Yeah a lot of iterations a lot of testing. Testing both in-house with developers. Can we really do it better with other ideas and with players to just see how this gameplay affects them? How the story works. Is the pacing good? So there’s a lot of testing, a lot of iterating and it’s really hard work but it pays off.

Was there a big “ah-ha” moment where you were able to see your idea in a game?

It’s camcorder puzzles. It’s also like this for players. Because this is something that is not easily expressed in words but once you do it, it’s much more intuitive and easy to repeat that. The idea for these puzzles was great for us, it works great for players because it’s not something that’s expected but this is very easy in the end. It’s intuitive. Once you do it once, you have an idea of how can you do it twice or however many times you need to? 

I noticed that when I fast-forwarded and unintentionally solved the puzzle.

You saw one way of doing those puzzles like with the doors. It’s different than with objects for example. You just saw one side but there will be lots of other sides so you’ll need to rethink what you already know but this is the same mechanism so if you feel confident in your skills you would just need to expand them. 

What about the challenges like working on a franchise like Blair Witch? There’s a lot of fans who are invested. How do you accommodate them but also bringing in a new audience?

It’s an amazing opportunity for us to work with that and we are very excited because we are fans of the movies. It changed horror forever. I will say that one of the challenges is that people remember it as such a cool thing, such a great phenomenon but they don’t really remember anything else. They have so many things that are just going on in their heads because it was their youth, it was the biggest thing back then but would they react the same way today? Would the people now react the same as the people who they were back then? There is a lot of nostalgia. Nostalgia can be both good and bad because you don’t really know what people expect anymore. Trends have changed. There are countless different movies. What do people expect now and how can we incorporate that into today’s trends? This is very tough and requires a lot of thinking about what players may want to get and how can you give it to them. We are pretty confident players will like [Blair Witch] but it’s always this, are we doing enough? 

Is there a story behind the dog [Bullet]?

The dog is really plot-relevant. You will see in the final game and what we were thinking. We  wanted to give something to the player you could care about. Blair Witch is typically about the group of teenagers going to the forest and we were actually thinking about adding other humans but in the end that this is not the way we wanted to go. Adding humans gives you the same two hands while with the dog, you get a totally different skill set. He’s great at sniffing, he can do different things, he can point you in the right direction based on his sense of smell but he can also solve puzzles. You have this cooperation with the player because the player can do different stuff than his companion does. They need to work together, they need to cooperate together in order to survive. 

I noticed in certain parts of the demo, the dog wasn’t with you. Are there parts where you’re going to be alone by yourself? 

Yeah! I don’t want to spoil too much but while you are both together you also need to work sometimes by yourself. And both are important. 

In closing, to people who are interested in Blair Witch. What’s something you want players to have a takeaway when they play this game?

There is lots to be seen and lots to be explored so prepare to be surprised. 

Blair Witch releases August 30, 2019, for PC digital platforms (Steam, GoG) and Xbox One.