Interviews
[Interview] Bloober Team Talk ‘Blair Witch’ Game, ‘Layers of Fear 2’, the Horror Genre, and More
Polish developer Bloober Team has risen to become one of the most interesting voices in indie horror. From the ashes of the poorly received Basement Crawl, the studio turned its fortunes around and hit big with its mind-trickery laden horror Layers of Fear. Since then, Bloober has made the grungy cyberpunk head fuck Observer, a nautical sequel to Layers of Fear, and next month, it releases a game set in the world of the Blair Witch films.
With Layers of Fear 2 just behind us, and the Blair Witch creeping ever closer, now seems like a good time to ask a few questions about the past, present, and future of Bloober Team, so we spoke to Barbara Kciuck and Maciej Glomb about Blair Witch and its time loops, Layers of Fear 2‘s cinematic homages, the criticism of Basement Crawl, why Polish developers embrace Cyberpunk, and why horror is the chosen genre for the team’s work.
Bloody Disgusting: The E3 reveal trailer for Blair Witch seemed to indicate that the game will, in some way, be playing with Groundhog Day-style time loops. Between 12 Minutes and Death Loop, which also had reveals at the show, Tequila Works’ in-development Groundhog Day VR game and this year’s Outer Wilds and Russian Doll, time loops seem to be in vogue right now. What do you think it is about our current moment that has made these kinds of stories popular? And why do you think a time loop narrative is a good fit for a horror game?
Barbara Kciuk: Doing the impossible will always be humans’ greatest fantasy. Traveling through time and escaping the consequences of our mistakes by erasing them altogether seems like a particularly enticing vision. And that’s exactly what authors of unnerving stories are looking for – alluring concepts which they can then twist horribly. Did you want to get rid of some small misstep from the past? Oops! You just made it all much worse. And now you must live with all of the horrible things you did and more.
As the reveal trailer suggested, Bloober Team’s Blair Witch will also feature time loops. However, without spoiling anything, let me just say that they are not the Groundhog Day-style loops. They are not there to help you make your situation better in the end. Blair Witch uses them for much more sinister reasons.
BD: Team developer Maciej Głomb has said that this will be the first Bloober Team game to include combat. How does introducing ways to fight back change the experience for fans of your games who have grown accustomed to running away?
Maciej Głomb: Yeah, I guess that’s the first time I can elaborate on this topic a little bit. [Laughs.] So it changes the experience for sure but I wouldn’t say it’s a drastic change. We are convinced that to create a truly horrifying horror experience in a video game you have to make the players feel vulnerable. When introducing new encounter mechanics we don’t really want to change that. What we want to do is to diversify gameplay mechanics. We already experimented with chase and stealth sequences and with Blair Witch we want to try yet another type of combat in which you will be finally able to defend yourself. Having said that we try to design it in such a way that it still feels as you’re a pray not a hunter.
BD: Observer is, personally, my favorite Bloober Team game. Will we ever see a sequel? If so, what would the team want to build on and improve from the original?
Maciej Głomb: Wow, Observer was such a special project for us. I’m probably a bit biased as it was my first project in the industry but I think I can speak for the whole studio saying that it was the first time we tried to create something so ambitious. From creating such an original story, placing cyberpunk subgenre in an Eastern European setting, through graphics that blended together Poland from the ‘80s with futuristic visions to a raw scale of the project. It was a huge challenge for us, both creatively and production wise. That’s why we’re so excited that the game was so well received. If you were to ask me personally I would love to make the sequel but we are currently focused on other exciting projects!
BD: Speaking of Observer, another Polish developer’s cyberpunk game got a lot of buzz at this E3. Are there aspects of Polish culture that make cyberpunk’s themes especially resonant?
Barbara Kciuk: Due to our history, Poland was for a very long time falling behind with new technology. When we finally had a chance to catch up, we needed to do it all at once. And trust me, we were hooked.
Maciej Głomb: What inspired us when making Observer was the fact that Eastern European Cyberpunk is not really an explored topic. We could go wild with it, creating our own personal vision and establishing a formula for anyone who would want to approach this subject in the future. We also had a cast of very talented people to do it – game designer Paweł Niezabitowski and art director Mateusz Lenart (both working now on Blair Witch), Wojciech Piejko, Andrzej Mądrzak and many more.
BD: Will we ever see Bloober Team branch out from first-person horror experiences? Are there other kinds of games that members of the team are itching to make? Will we ever see a Friday the 13th-style multiplayer game from your studio, or even a non-horror experience?
Barbara Kciuk: After releasing three major horror titles of consistent quality, we’re confident in our skills. We know what we do best and we want to use this knowledge in our future projects. But we also believe that there’s always a room for improvement. With each new title, we intend to experiment with some new elements of the formula. To stay relevant in the video game industry you need to improvise, change and improve. That’s especially true for horror, as the players won’t fall for the same trick twice. And if bringing elements of other genres to the mix will improve the experience, then yeah, you can be sure we’ll do that someday in the future, this might even include a multiplayer experience, who knows.
BD: So, Layers of Fear 2 released in May, Blair Witch is coming in August and a third unannounced project is also in the works. Has Bloober Team grown substantially since Observer? How large are the teams working on each game?
Maciej Głomb: Yeah I guess it sounds as if we’ve absorbed a few other indie dev studios. [Laughs.] Of course it would be impossible to develop three games of this caliber at once if we haven’t hired more talent since Observer. Right now we have around 100 people at the office which is probably around 50% more than during the production of Observer. We’ve created three core teams, each working on one project. We also have a team of people with unique skills needed in all three projects. Based on our needs, we assign them accordingly. As you can guess most of them are working on Blair Witch right now. [Laughs.]
BD: Previous Bloober Team games have taken place in closed environments. In Layers of Fear, players were trapped in a house; in Observer, in a tenement building; and in Layers of Fear 2, a cruise ship. How has the team had to adjust their approach to environmental design to make an engaging experience set in the iconic woods of Blair Witch?
Maciej Głomb: Yes, you’re completely right. Our games are known for messing with environment and player’s sense of direction and we’ve already done it in many different spaces. What they had in common though was that they were all pretty narrow, closed areas where we had a lot more control over the player’s attention. We could almost certainly predict where the player will go or look. In Blair Witch we partially lose that control. This time the players will have many big open areas to explore and we can’t always be sure what they are going to do. It all comes down to making the transitions as seamless as possible to invoke this feeling of ‘wow’ in the player when he/she realizes it is not where he/she was supposed to be. We are happy to have some really talented art designers and programmers who can make this magic happen!
Barbara Kciuk: For us, open spaces are not only a challenge but also an opportunity. Sure, it would be much harder to repeat the same tricks we used in Layers of Fear or Observer, but the thing is – we don’t really want to repeat them. We want to experiment and bring something new to the game. And a forest setting gives you completely new tools to play with. Players can never be sure what lurks in the darkness.
BD: Since Basement Crawl was met with heavy criticism in 2014, Bloober has clearly been on an upwards trajectory, starting with that decision to remake that game as Brawl and release it for free. Did the response to that game play a big part in shaping the Bloober we see today?
Maciej Głomb: As with everything in your life, criticism of what you devote yourself to do can sometimes heavily influence you. We weren’t happy with how Basement Crawl had been received and wanted to make up for it with Brawl. What I think is more important though, is that this experience forced us to sit down and reconsider what kind of games we really want to develop. You are probably aware of that but it’s an enormous difference to do something you want to do versus something you have to do. Layers of Fear turned the tables for us as I think it was the first time that everyone was on the same page, everyone wanted to contribute as much as they could. What’s more I think that this idea of creating psychological horror really got to all of us and attracted more developers who were fans of the genre as well, and helping us with our upcoming projects. Then Observer happened which as I already said was a real breakthrough for us; we’ve just released Layers of Fear 2 and Blair Witch is soon to come next. We are just really excited to have this clear vision ahead of us and pursue it with every project.
BD: You’ve worked with some cult sci-fi/horror icons like Tony Todd and Rutger Hauer in your previous games, will Blair Witch also feature another cult name?
Barbara Kciuk: This time the biggest cult name will be the Blair Witch herself! We didn’t want to bring someone associated with a different title in to not spoil the mix, so this time we’re focusing more on this legendary universe rather than on celebrities.
BD: Would you say a love of cinema powers much of Bloober’s work? Layers of Fear 2 itself is a celebration of film history as much as it is a horror game, for instance.
Barbara Kciuk: Yeah, that love is very important for our work. However, I wouldn’t limit that to just cinema. We’re a very diverse team full of creative people and we love art in every form and shape. Although Layers of Fear 2 deals with cinematography in the most direct way, each of our games is influenced by it in some way but definitely not limited only to it. Works of culture, in general, are a boundless source of inspiration and the more of it fuels your imagination, the richer experiences you are able to create.
Maciej Głomb: Bartosz Kaproń, who is a Lead Designer of Layers of Fear 2 is a huge fan of cinematography himself. He did such a great job with incorporating all these movie references in the game in a way that is both noticeable for fans of various films and smooth enough and impactful on the overall experience for those who don’t recognize them. I think what he did in Layers of Fear 2 is exactly what we want to do in our games – create those love letters to our passions while providing our players with deeply unsettling horror games. And we can’t wait to show you more!
Layers of Fear 2 is out now on PS4, Xbox One, and PC. Blair Witch will be released on Xbox One and PC on August 30
Interviews
Paul Tremblay on Fighting AI with Horror in New Novel ‘Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep’
Paul Tremblay didn’t start his writing career believing he’d be battling machines over the sanctity of his job, but like so many writers of his generation, the battle found him. In the years since Large Language Models (LLMs) and neural networks started gaining traction as an advertised shortcut to creativity, Tremblay has been active in lawsuits to prevent the use of his works in training AI models, and he’s found that, with each new project, he has to consider the possibility that some LLM, somewhere, is going to latch on to what he’s creating.
“Now I feel like I’m thinking about, ‘Man, how am I going to write things that would be really hard or impossible for an AI to replicate?’,” Tremblay told me, speaking by Zoom from his home in Massachusetts. “Maybe some of that is ego. I’m sure every writer thinks, ‘Oh, an AI could never write what I write.’ Yes, I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of the thought process.”
While that’s something Tremblay might consider with any new work at this point in his career, the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts, The Cabin at the End of the World, and many other novels and short stories tackled it in a more direct way with his latest book. Inspired by Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, and the quirky humor of the Coen Brothers, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is Tremblay’s attempt at a sci-fi-horror mash-up that’s both darkly funny and existentially nightmarish. It’s also, in his own words, a screed against the movement by AI companies to supplant human artists.
“I didn’t want to make it too didactic, but no, I playfully described this book as an anti-AI screed,” he said. “This book, in particular, was driven by anger and frustration, for sure. Not every book is going to be driven that way.“
Despite the emotions that fueled it, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep does not read like a screed. Instead, wielding offbeat humor and tech concepts that feel both lived-in and frighteningly tactile, the book lays out tandem narratives all building to the same conclusion, each of them exploring our relationship to machine learning in a different way. One of these narratives belongs to Julia, a former gaming streamer looking for a new challenge in life, who gets a call from a California tech company with an interesting offer.
Paul Tremblay in documentary series “First Word on Horror”
The company has, it seems, implanted some new technology in a brain-dead middle-aged man which will, in theory, allow them to pilot the man’s body through a rudimentary, still-developing system of controls. Julia, with her gaming background, would be the pilot, in her own way just as much a test subject as the human vegetable she’s controlling.
Julia is a Gen Z streamer with an omnivorous pop culture appetite, inspired by Tremblay’s own adult children, who riffs on The Big Lebowski constantly and calls her strange new meat puppet “Bernie” in reference to Weekend at Bernie’s. Her wide frame of reference, and her interest in art and stories far beyond video games, is in part informed by Tremblay’s own experiences with Gen Z, and in part a response to AI companies who scrape art and culture as a means of consuming it for reference without really experiencing a story.
“I know that one of the arguments that OpenAI and other tech companies are trying to make is like, ‘Hey, you writers, you artists, you take pop culture, you take your influences, and you create something. That’s just the same thing that the bots are doing.’ And it’s just not,” Tremblay said. “I wanted to have Julia have her outlook informed by all this pop culture, and I wanted to make that feel really human as a way to show how inhuman the AI is.”
The other side of the story belongs to “Bernie,” who’s addressed in his point-of-view chapters as “You.” In these chapters, the technology in Bernie’s body starts to flicker images through his seemingly dead brain, delivering half-remembered imagery and perspective in a nod to the “hallucinations” of an AI model groping for understanding it can never reach. These chapters in particular show off Tremblay’s flair for formalist shake-ups, and echo the kind of hyperstimulated writing that Dick and Ellison made so influential.
“I think it was more just the general Philip K. Dick feeling of ‘The world is so strange,'” Tremblay said. “He’s a lot funnier, I think, than maybe a lot of people credit him. That’s definitely what I was thinking of when writing the book.“
Bernie’s chapters embody the strangeness of Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, presenting imagery that’s at times puzzling, at times eerily filmic, and always unnerving. They also mirror Julia’s own journey in fascinating ways as the odd couple – the Gen Z gamer and the middle-aged vegetable – traverse the United States, and the tech in Bernie’s body wakes up to the possibilities of using his flesh for its own purposes. It’s a compelling narrative technique, but it presented some new writing challenges for Tremblay.
“I quickly realized I couldn’t write this book the same way I have in the past,” he said. “By that, I mean all my other novels I had written in the order in which it was presented, even things that are nonlinear, which is most of them. I knew I couldn’t do that in this book. It’s not a spoiler, but hopefully the readers figure out pretty early that the Bernie chapters are a little bit of a preview of the next chapter from Julia, what’s actually happening with Julia. It’s all refracted from him.”
Mary Roach’s Stiff
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep began with a simple image, inspired by Tremblay’s reading of Mary Roach‘s book chronicling the history of our treatment of corpses, Stiff. As he read, Tremblay imagined a body sitting on an airplane, remote-controlled by someone else. At the time, it was a “silly what-if” concept, filed away in his head. Years later, when he became an author suing a tech company to keep AI from scraping his work for ideas, it started to feel frighteningly plausible, taking the “silly what-if” into the territory of a high-concept horror show about what happens when we try to exploit and commodify uniquely human aspects of consciousness.
“It stuck with me,” Tremblay said of that what-if imagery. “And then a few years later, when I was a part of the case suing OpenAI on behalf of writers, that what-if suddenly didn’t seem as silly. The more I learned about how that corporation operates and without really any sort of ethical thought to anything, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to play with that. That’s actually happening.”
So, what if someone actually in favor of generative AI picks up Tremblay’s self-described “anti-AI screed?” He hopes that, at the very least, he’s made the ride enjoyable in a distinctly human way that might begin to reshape the conversation.
“I think that was another reason why I wanted to have the humor,” Tremblay said. “If people are reading this book who aren’t on the side of like, ‘Hey, LLMs taking authors’ books is bad,’ maybe if they read something that’s cut with some humor, that maybe they’ll be more easily swayed.”
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is now in bookstores everywhere.
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