Horrors Lurk Just out of Sight in the Dread-Soaked Blair Witch Launch Trailer

Horror fans can return to one of the genre’s most iconic cursed forests in Blair Witch, launching today, Aug. 30, from Bloober Team and Lionsgate Games. The first-person, psychological-horror game, an original story inspired by the 1999 modern horror classic, casts the player as Ellis, a former police officer with a troubled past forced to confront all kinds of mind-bending evil alongside his trusty canine companion, Bullet.

After a nine-year-old boy goes missing, Ellis and Bullet venture into the Black Hills Forest to search for him, soon discovering the horrors that have haunted the woods since the events of The Blair Witch Project (which, in the world of the 1996-set game, occurred two years earlier). “The woods twist and turn into an endless nightmare,” a press release explains. “Ellis will have to confront his fears, and his past, along with the mysterious force that haunts the woods.” Players will question the reality of what they’re seeing every step of the way, wondering if they’re headed to safety or just deeper into the Blair Witch’s stomping grounds, much like the original film’s ill-fated protagonists.

“[Blair Witch] is our own original take, our own original story. And we wanted to get this mythos as a background and set our story in it,” Blair Witch lead writer Barbara Kciuk recently told Paste. “We wanted to add something else, something new to the story. This is … an expansion of the universe. It’s something new, it’s something original, it’s adding some elements, but we always take care to make it feel as natural for this universe as possible.”

Blair Witch ($29.99) is out now for PC and Xbox One, with a deluxe edition ($34.99) that includes some extra goodies also available on Steam. Watch the launch trailer below and revisit a previous trailer for the game here.