Gameplay

Let there by pentacles!

Compared to the last game in the series, Ritual's take on the Blair Witch is a masterpiece. While we still had some issues with BW3's gameplay, the presentation and execution were surprising good.

Blair Witch 3, like the previous two Blair Witch games, is based on the Nocturne engine and thus it shares the same third person cinematic point of view as its predecessors. The cinematic point of view is nice. It easily conveys mood and feeling, but it often makes combat very rough, especially with fixed camera angles. If a game's emphasis is on combat (as every game in the Blair Witch series is) the third person point of view can harm a game as much as it helps. While Ritual has improved the combat system, the game still suffers from poor combat angles and the resulting difficulty in maneuvering.

Posing

And you thought I was kidding about the Dore comments.

Ritual realized the cons of the third person point of view, and took steps to remedy them. As in BW2 your character has a tiny red crosshair, a translucent pentacle. This pentacle guides your weaponry. The crosshair is nothing new for a Nocturne engine game, but Ritual added another element to guide Prye's weapons. Whenever your weaponry is properly aimed at a target a faint red aura will appear around the target. Though the aura detracts from the feel and realism of the game, it does help the combat immensely. Most cinematic style adventure games rely solely on an autoaim to help you get through the game, but with the "red aura" you don't need to worry about the unrewarding nature of autoaims.

You get to make good use of this targeting system as well thanks to a very wide variety of weapons. Ritual offers us a classic pistol, an arquebus, a holy cross used as a melee weapon, a burning cross used to light your enemy on fire from a distance, a pagan spell to bind your enemies in place, a native American shaman's rod to call down lightning on your enemies and a whole mess of other goodies. You'll also be able to pick up a few Native American talismans, like a doll that shakes when danger is about.

Blood bath

Sturdy?

Abandon all hope ye who enter here

A lot of "survival horror" games tend to have ravenous but terribly slow moving zombies or like monsters. BW3 has its share of languid zombies as well, but as a whole the grade of enemies is much higher than what you would expect to see in a typical horror game. You'll encounter a wide variety of enemies, the zombies of fallen villagers, undead priests, hellhounds, an assortment of demons and a few other thoroughly evil creatures as well.

One of the coolest things about Blair Witch 3 is that the monsters fit in perfectly with the game. While BW3 throws plenty of demons at you, they're not all the stock meanies. Remember the semi-invisible demon-pig from Doom? Imagine how much more effective a translucent monster would be in an almost pitch-black environment. Especially when that environment is closed, claustrophobic, with nooks and crannies everywhere. The only way to spot the demon is to shine your lantern on it, or hope that you can spot an out-of-place shadow. The BW3 demon is by far the scariest creature I've ever fought against.

It's a grade-A evil.	This is no kind of good.
Klatu verata niktu!	The dead rise.

I will walk 500 miles... [SPOILERS BELOW!]

By the end of BW3 you will begin feeling like an Olympian. BW3 involves a lot of running. For example, at one point you need to get into Elly Kedward's house, but you have no idea how to get to it. So you run back to town to see the local witch imprisoned there, she gives you direction only after you run out into the woods and do something for her, at which point you run back to town, get the directions, and then run back out to Elly Kedward's house.

Once you get to the house, a force there prevents you from going inside, which requires you to run and see a local wiseman, who tells you how to accomplish things and then you are forced to run back again. You do all this running through the Blair woods, which is populated with zombies, the most uninteresting enemies in the game.