The woods are easy to be scared of. It's difficult to reorient yourself if you get lost, with each passing moment bringing night closer and making an already unsettling wrong turn seem life-threatening. In Blair Witch, the woods are a character you have to fight against at every turn. Each cracking branch underneath your feet will startle you, every bit of movement in the distance trying to trick your senses into believing something is there. At its best, Blair Witch does a lot with very little to instill a strong sense of paranoia and dread, but it struggles to maintain that atmosphere throughout.

You play as Ellis, a former police officer that takes it upon himself to head into the infamous Black Hills Forest in Burkittsville, Maryland to investigate yet another child disappearance during 1996. Ellis is troubled; he suffers frequent panic attacks that allude to post-traumatic stress from his time in the military and the police force, and he's pushed away everyone who cares for him as a result. Ellis is the perfect candidate for the persuasions of Black Hills Forest, making his ventures deeper into the woods more perilous with each passing second.

To keep you from succumbing to stress and anxiety, you have Bullet--a gorgeous and loyal police dog given to you by your former sheriff–to keep you on track. Sticking close to Bullet keeps you calm and also lets you follow his helpful hints. Bullet will sniff out clues for you to inspect and trails for you to follow, making the labyrinthine forest easier to navigate. Bullet is also great at alerting you to imminent dangers nearby, barking at enemies lurking in the trees and unseen foes buried in a thick fog. In a way, Bullet's job is to escort you throughout most of Blair Witch's runtime, and it's truly disconcerting when he's not by your side.

Ellis' vivid and violent panic attacks are just one side effect of Bullet's absence, letting the horrors of Black Hills flood his reality and warp it. The woods themselves twist and turn, with trees overlapping each other to trap you in looping pathways or rearrange your understanding of where landmarks are. It makes it difficult to ever feel safe in any spot, since you don't know where to run should you need to. The general, overwhelming silence of the woods is undercut delicately with reverberating environmental sounds that heighten your sensory tension, making you jump at every little noise. Blair Witch achieves its most tense moments when seemingly nothing is happening at all, letting your imagination get the better of you just as Ellis begins to question his own sanity.

This doesn't persist all the way through, and it's Blair Witch's more surreal elements that don't quite stick. There are two types of enemies: those that burst into dust when you shine your flashlight on them, and those that you can't kill at all and have to avoid instead. When Bullet alerts you to enemies ahead, you can simply shine the light in the direction he's barking if they're killable; if they're immune, you can easily spot them as red outlines on your camcorder and sneak past them with little trouble. Either approach doesn't require much thought and neither of these encounters are that suspenseful, going so far as to remove you from the tension of the environment around you.

There's also the occasional puzzle as you venture through the woods, and although they are less intrusive to the overall atmosphere, they're hardly any more inventive than the enemies. The main puzzle mechanic works with your camcorder and red-labelled tapes, which in tandem let you manipulate parts of the environment around you. A massive log might be blocking your path ahead, but you're able to move it by rewinding a tape shot from the same location backwards a few seconds and continuing on your way. A locked door can be overcome in the same way, so long as you keep the tape associated with it paused at a point where the door stands open. The idea of manipulating time to your advantage is clever, but the solutions are so obvious that it's never satisfying to solve the puzzles they're attached to.

So many of these enemy encounters and puzzles disrupt the flow of navigating the eerie woods that they get in the way of its overall effect, as well as the story's pacing. Blair Witch doesn't tell a complex tale, and its twists are drawn out over such a long time that it's easy to see them coming way before they have any chance to land impactfully. Each narrative thread comes to a head in the final chapters, where the subtlety of the woods is replaced with over-the-top surrealism that attempts to quickly wrangle all the loose ends thrown at you up to this point. Their resolutions are disappointingly predictable, making the promise of "your actions are being watched" at the beginning of the game an empty one.

There are additional endings to see if you follow some incredibly strict rules on subsequent playthroughs, but the one you're probably going to see on your first run-through is likely the one that will stick with you. You're only given one big choice to make that is both obvious and has a tangible impact on one facet of the ending you get. The rest of the choices are almost impossible to follow without looking up what they are first, and even then, they seem more like mundane challenges than intelligent pivots for the story to make based on your actions. The lack of clarity in the choices makes subsequent playthroughs far less inviting, especially when the faint spark of new puzzles and unfamiliar scares is no longer there to entertain you.

For all the gripping tension that its setting instills, Blair Witch can't maintain its initially frightening atmosphere and ends up losing it entirely by its conclusion. It doesn't capture the paranoid horror of its namesake in the same way, partly due to wonky enemy encounters that tread on the ambiguity of its central antagonist and one-note puzzle-solving that rips you out of its meticulously crafted atmosphere. While it's still unnerving to have the silence of empty woods pierced by the alerted barks of your canine companion, Blair Witch can't recapture its tense opening moments and carry them through to a strong and captivating finale.

The woods are easy to be scared of. It's difficult to reorient yourself if you get lost, with each passing moment bringing night closer and making an already unsettling wrong turn seem life-threatening. In Blair Witch, the woods are a character you have to fight against at every turn. Each cracking branch underneath your feet will startle you, every bit of movement in the distance trying to trick your senses into believing something is there. At its best, Blair Witch does a lot with very little to instill a strong sense of paranoia and dread, but it struggles to maintain that atmosphere throughout.

You play as Ellis, a former police officer that takes it upon himself to head into the infamous Black Hills Forest in Burkittsville, Maryland to investigate yet another child disappearance during 1996. Ellis is troubled; he suffers frequent panic attacks that allude to post-traumatic stress from his time in the military and the police force, and he's pushed away everyone who cares for him as a result. Ellis is the perfect candidate for the persuasions of Black Hills Forest, making his ventures deeper into the woods more perilous with each passing second.

To keep you from succumbing to stress and anxiety, you have Bullet--a gorgeous and loyal police dog given to you by your former sheriff–to keep you on track. Sticking close to Bullet keeps you calm and also lets you follow his helpful hints. Bullet will sniff out clues for you to inspect and trails for you to follow, making the labyrinthine forest easier to navigate. Bullet is also great at alerting you to imminent dangers nearby, barking at enemies lurking in the trees and unseen foes buried in a thick fog. In a way, Bullet's job is to escort you throughout most of Blair Witch's runtime, and it's truly disconcerting when he's not by your side.

Ellis' vivid and violent panic attacks are just one side effect of Bullet's absence, letting the horrors of Black Hills flood his reality and warp it. The woods themselves twist and turn, with trees overlapping each other to trap you in looping pathways or rearrange your understanding of where landmarks are. It makes it difficult to ever feel safe in any spot, since you don't know where to run should you need to. The general, overwhelming silence of the woods is undercut delicately with reverberating environmental sounds that heighten your sensory tension, making you jump at every little noise. Blair Witch achieves its most tense moments when seemingly nothing is happening at all, letting your imagination get the better of you just as Ellis begins to question his own sanity.

This doesn't persist all the way through, and it's Blair Witch's more surreal elements that don't quite stick. There are two types of enemies: those that burst into dust when you shine your flashlight on them, and those that you can't kill at all and have to avoid instead. When Bullet alerts you to enemies ahead, you can simply shine the light in the direction he's barking if they're killable; if they're immune, you can easily spot them as red outlines on your camcorder and sneak past them with little trouble. Either approach doesn't require much thought and neither of these encounters are that suspenseful, going so far as to remove you from the tension of the environment around you.

There's also the occasional puzzle as you venture through the woods, and although they are less intrusive to the overall atmosphere, they're hardly any more inventive than the enemies. The main puzzle mechanic works with your camcorder and red-labelled tapes, which in tandem let you manipulate parts of the environment around you. A massive log might be blocking your path ahead, but you're able to move it by rewinding a tape shot from the same location backwards a few seconds and continuing on your way. A locked door can be overcome in the same way, so long as you keep the tape associated with it paused at a point where the door stands open. The idea of manipulating time to your advantage is clever, but the solutions are so obvious that it's never satisfying to solve the puzzles they're attached to.

So many of these enemy encounters and puzzles disrupt the flow of navigating the eerie woods that they get in the way of its overall effect, as well as the story's pacing. Blair Witch doesn't tell a complex tale, and its twists are drawn out over such a long time that it's easy to see them coming way before they have any chance to land impactfully. Each narrative thread comes to a head in the final chapters, where the subtlety of the woods is replaced with over-the-top surrealism that attempts to quickly wrangle all the loose ends thrown at you up to this point. Their resolutions are disappointingly predictable, making the promise of "your actions are being watched" at the beginning of the game an empty one.

There are additional endings to see if you follow some incredibly strict rules on subsequent playthroughs, but the one you're probably going to see on your first run-through is likely the one that will stick with you. You're only given one big choice to make that is both obvious and has a tangible impact on one facet of the ending you get. The rest of the choices are almost impossible to follow without looking up what they are first, and even then, they seem more like mundane challenges than intelligent pivots for the story to make based on your actions. The lack of clarity in the choices makes subsequent playthroughs far less inviting, especially when the faint spark of new puzzles and unfamiliar scares is no longer there to entertain you.

For all the gripping tension that its setting instills, Blair Witch can't maintain its initially frightening atmosphere and ends up losing it entirely by its conclusion. It doesn't capture the paranoid horror of its namesake in the same way, partly due to wonky enemy encounters that tread on the ambiguity of its central antagonist and one-note puzzle-solving that rips you out of its meticulously crafted atmosphere. While it's still unnerving to have the silence of empty woods pierced by the alerted barks of your canine companion, Blair Witch can't recapture its tense opening moments and carry them through to a strong and captivating finale.

Finally having had a chance to play Marvel’s Avengers — specifically it’s tutorial level now widely available to be watched — I think I have a much better understanding of the experience that awaits in the full release next year. That, in part, came from hearing more about how character progression works for Marvel's Avengers, but also in actually playing as each of Earth’s mightiest heroes — and finding them all, generally, to be quite fun to play. Crystal Dynamics has taken on the ambitious attack of making essentially five action games in one, working to make a group of iconic heroes all unique and fun to play as if they were the stars of their own games.

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Activision and Infinity Ward have announced Call of Duty: Modern Warfare's Road to Launch, a scheduled list of events leading up to release that includes Betas and a deeper look into Crossplay, Campaign, and Special Ops.

Announced by Call of Duty on Twitter, Road to Launch begins next week with the PlayStation Exclusive Open Beta. The full schedule of events are as follows;

• September 12-16: PlayStation Exclusive Open Beta Weekend
• Week of September 16: Crossplay Details
• September 19-23: Crossplay Open Beta

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Thieves stole over $240,000 by using voice-mimicking software to trick a company’s employee. The thieves used an AI voice deepfake of a company executive to get the employee to wire money to an offsite account in what researchers say is the first publicly reported AI heist.

If you haven’t heard by now, AI technology like deepfakes are able to accurately mimic or copy the likeness and sound of real people. This is what happened to one company’s managing director who received a call from someone he believed was his superior. The superior’s voice told the employee to wire the money to a Hungarian bank account to avoid “late-payment fines.”

According to the company’s insurer Euler Hermes, who detailed the events of the heist to The Washington Post, the AI-altered voice “was able to imitate the voice, and not only the voice: the tonality, the punctuation, the German accent,” of the company superior. The heist was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

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Following yesterday's 40-minute Nintendo Direct extravaganza, Nintendo revealed that five new Mii Fighter costumes were coming to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate - but only one stole the hearts and attention spans of fans across the internet: Sans from Undertale.

Sans is a wisecracking, fatalist, lazy skeleton with a penchant for fighting, and fans have been requesting he be added to Smash Ultimate as a fighter for quite some time (though judging by fan reactions, nobody thought it would actually happen). While Sans isn't an original fighter, his Mii Gunner outfit is pretty darn faithful to his character, complete with his dimpled smile, skull Gaster Blaster, and comfy pink slippers.

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All September long, IGN is highlighting the best TV coming your way in the 2019-2020 season. Today, we're delving into the world of Hulu's Reprisal, created by Josh Corbin. The series centers on a relentless femme fatale who, after being left for dead, leads a vengeful campaign against a bombastic gang of gearheads. Reprisal features the acting talents of Abigail Spencer (Timeless), Rodrigo Santoro (300), and Mena Massoud (Aladdin). The series premieres on Hulu on Friday, December 6, 2019.

IGN spoke to Reprisal's creator, Josh Corbin, who has been working on this particular project "for the better part of 10 years." Abigail Spencer stars as femme fatale Doris Quinn, a woman hell-bent on revenge after being left for dead. At a time when adaptations and reboots are commonplace, Corbin is attempting to create something unique for Hulu.

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For the last few years, the Lenovo Mirage Augmented Reality headset has been the best way to experience lightsaber battles with the Star Wars: Jedi Challenges game. This year, the Lenovo Mirage AR will let you explore another universe that’s closer to home and from a time not too long ago with Marvel Dimension of Heroes.

For those hearing about the Mirage AR headset for the first time, it’s basically Lenovo’s version of the Samsung Gear VR. You can slot almost any iPhone or Android phone into the headset and it'll project the characters into your eyes using a one-way mirror. The experience doesn't have you dive completely into a virtual reality world, rather this experience places digital characters in your living room, backyard, airport or anywhere you decide you want to play.

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PlayStation 4 exclusive title Days Gone will be getting a free update that includes New Game Plus mode on September 13 and at least one gun and Bike skin from Syphon Filter.

Announced by Days Gone's game director Jeff Ross from Bend Studio, this New Game Plus mode will allow players to replay Days Gone with "the advantage of previously earned weapons, bike upgrades, NERO boosters, skills, recipes, encampment trust and credits, collectibles, and trophy progress unlocked from the beginning."

New Game Plus can be activated on any save file that has the "I'm Never Giving Up" storyline completed and any difficulty level can also be used, including the newest Hard II and Survival II difficulties.

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Unlike the phenomenal HBO miniseries that recreated the horrific events of 1986 with gripping realism, Chernobylite uses one of humankind's greatest catastrophes as a stepping off point for a survival horror experience with a distinctly supernatural slant. After having around an hour of hands-on time with a pre-alpha build of the game, I’m certainly intrigued to see more of this stealth-driven shooter that derives just as much dread from the nervous crackling of its Geiger counter as it does from its HR Giger-esque enemies.

Set 30 years after the disaster, Chernobylite puts you in the shoes of Igor,a physicist formerly employed at the Chernobyl nuclear plant who returns to the disaster zone in search of his missing wife, Tatyana. The opening of my hands-on demo had Igor infiltrating the bowels of the facility in order to extract a piece of chernobylite, a product of the nuclear accident that in the words of Igor, “creates transcendental bijection of the spacetime continuum”. For those of us who aren’t Stephen Hawking, that means the chernobylite is able to power Igor’s portal gun in order to teleport between areas via a singularity bubble. In my demo the use of this portal gun seemed to be restricted to returning Igor back to his base after completing a mission, but theoretically it could have time travel or transdimensional uses later on in the game.

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