There's an easter egg in the new Blair Witch from Bloober Team that lets you play early aughts games on your character's cell phone. As Ellis - a man who's part of a search party looking for a boy lost in the infamous Black Hill Forest - one of your only tools is an old school cell phone, we're talking pre-Motorola Razr old school.
For most of the game, that phone is only used to call and receive calls from Ellis' on and off partner, Jess, and to get texts from both her and unknown numbers (those ones are freaky). But, as it's always an available item on your item wheel, you can access it anytime you like - I for one chose to randomly call the veterinarian when I was especially scared, hoping we could chat about my cute dog, Bullet (who's apparently had ear trouble in the past).
But one of the game's best easter eggs is hidden in that phone: retro cell phone games, the likes of which dazzled older millennials in the early '00s. That's right, you can play Snake in Blair Witch (here it's called Cobra Masters) by pulling up the game and using the D-pad on your Xbox controller to maneuver the snake as it eats items, growing a pixel longer with each meal. Crashing into your own tail or the edge of the board ends the game. I may have had a score well into the hundreds on my flame-cased Nokia in 2002, but I could only make it up 9 in Blair Witch. Embarrassing.
There's also another, Space Invaders-like game called Shooter Deluxe that lets you maneuver a small ship back and forth, shooting at other moving ships that are firing back at you.
The inclusion of retro phone games in Blair Witch is a cleverly irreverent move - one that can be made even more surreal depending upon when you whip out the phone for a raucous game of Snake, er, Cobra Masters. It's kind of hilarious to try and best the phone game while a row of Blair Witch idols hung ominously from a tree in front of me. To each their own.
Blair Witch is available now for Xbox One and PC.
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