While some might cringe at the thought that the control system returns (personally I've never had problems with it), no one, even those who vehemently hated Nocturne, can accuse this game of being ugly. The designers at Terminal Reality have created a highly convincing town from 1941 with rich textures and obvious attention to detail, fully utilising the power of the Nocturne engine. The town is also inhabited by characters more life like and detailed than any in Nocturne as they now seem to include higher detail skins and lip syncing. True to the film you spend a lot of time running around the woods looking for new information and taking out a few nasties along the way, and although there's not much to look at other than trees and earth covered by fallen leaves, in time the woods prove to be just as impressive a sight as the town. While the film makers used shaking trees to put your nerves on edge, Terminal Reality instead use lighting to do so, sometimes using clichéd but effective lightning flashes but more often changing the ambient lighting to give the woods an eerie feel. The best heart-stopping moments, though, come from numerous scripted sequences, the first of these being a cleverly conceived moment (I won't spoil the surprise by mentioning details) that literally made me jump out of my seat for the first time since playing the Marine in Aliens versus Predator.

If you actually paid close attention to the film you'll remember that there was a fair amount of background to the Blair Witch myth such as the horrific tale of Coffin Rock, the girl who drowned in only a few inches of river water, and of course Elly Kedward, the woman rumoured to be the Blair Witch herself. Much of the game is spent delving further into this background by talking to locals and reading library tomes. By the end of the game you'll have a reasonably extensive set of notes in Doc Holliday's journal that reveal more about the Blair Witch legend, even discovering just what those crude, people-shaped stick figures are actually about. The aforementioned rest of the game involves solving some relatively simple puzzles (although you can up the difficulty when you start the game) and a fair amount of monster killing, although not as much as in Nocturne. After all, Doc Holliday is a scientist rather than a well-armed killing machine like The Stranger is.