Heart of the Forest is a 2026 FMV game developed by German developer Trapped Predator and published by Wales Interactive. It’s billed as an interactive horror movie, and that’s a fairly accurate description. Four young hikers, Laura, Anna, Nick and Simon, venture into the Black Forest, and before long they’re lost, paranoid and being stalked by malevolent forces. There’s an obvious comparison to The Blair Witch Project, with the characters falling out and losing their way, but also in the connection to local folklore and the sense of being stalked through the woods by an unseen entity, but there are a couple of specific reasons to discuss Blair Witch in connection with the game.

One is related to a moment later in the game where Simon finds an abandoned video camera and there’s a brief found-footage horror sequence. This may be personal preference. I know that for a while found-footage films were hated by the majority of horror fans due to oversaturation, but I’ve always loved the format, and this moment in the game made me wonder if there had been any full found-footage FMV games. I think it could work really well, especially as some first-person horror-games, such as the Outlast series, mirror found footage horror films with their use of video cameras within the games.

The other reason I bring up Blair Witch is to do with types of protagonist. The characters in The Blair Witch Project go into the woods near Burkittsville with the express intention of making a documentary about the Blair Witch. This gives the aimless wandering through the woods an immediate purpose that carries the audience through the first act, to the point where they encounter unexpected challenges and the story takes them on a different path than they intended. They are active protagonists.

Heart of the Forest takes a different approach, and it’s one that many other horror films take as well, but I wondered if there’s something particularly relevant about this approach in relation to the video game medium. The characters in the game are initially passive. They go into the Black Forest with no greater intention than having a nice hike. That’s not to say there isn’t characterisation here, because as the story unfolds, it is revealed that the characters all have unspoken trauma that the forest will force them to confront. However, in the opening act, they enter the forest as observers, with no set destination until the story provides one for them.

I think there are pros and cons to this approach. The advantage is that the characters begin with no clear objective, which works well for an interactive movie where you want the player to have some agency in forming the characters by way of their decisions. However, it does rob the game of some momentum early on and makes the initial decisions feel somewhat arbitrary. When the first character is separated from the group, it feels forced, like it happens because the story needs it to happen rather than being driven by either the player or the characters’ decisions.

Once the story gets going, it works much better than in the opening act, notably from the moment they find other characters in the woods. Every now and again, the player will be offered a decision between two choices. Some branch off into entirely separate sequences, while others don’t seem to matter too much but will later affect how the story plays out and ultimately how it ends. The game allows you access to the story tree throughout, so you can see where the narrative branches. I will say, it’s not the most complex branching narrative, and the plot is fairly linear. The story always ends in the same place, and the only real influence you have over the ending is how many of the characters survive.

I didn’t mind the linearity of the story in this case. Heart of the Forest achieves exactly what it sets out to do, in that it is an interactive horror movie. It feels like watching a horror movie, but at the point where you would be screaming at the characters not to go into the dark cave, for example, you can actually make that decision for them. There are still moments where the characters make bad decisions (like when Anna discovers the water they’re drinking is bad but neglects to tell anyone), or more accurately there is dissonance between the option I chose and what the characters actually did, but for the most part, this minor influence over the course of a horror movie works well.

The reason it works is that it looks and feels like a polished film. The location is stunning, but the filmmakers don’t overuse it, and there are scenes in the local town as well as a cave setting and some kind of dungeon. It’s very well shot, and by that I don’t just mean they had expensive cameras; it looks and feels like a movie. It’s an effective horror film too, with a genuinely creepy atmosphere and some good jump scares. I’ve seen a few criticisms of the acting online, and there are moments that feel a little inauthentic, but for the most part, I think the actors did a fantastic job of selling what was happening to the characters. Having worked on a horror film that was also set mostly in the woods (2020’s Paintball Massacre), I know how tough it is for an actor to make such a heightened situation seem real. There’s also a story reason for the characters to be speaking English, despite it not being their first language, and this accounts for moments where the dialogue may feel a little stilted.

It’s because the FMV sequences are so polished that I’ll forgive the other issue, which is that it often doesn’t feel very much like a game. There are some overlong sequences, and on my first playthrough, I had a couple of moments where I forgot I was playing a game and was almost surprised when I had to make a decision. There are stats in the game that show how much the characters have been corrupted by the forest, but I think more could have been made of this aspect. I also received a couple of trophies for things that I felt I’d had no control over whatsoever.

Crucially, Heart of the Forest doesn’t outstay its welcome, and I enjoyed my time with it. For what it sets out to do, it does very well. My one regret is that I played it alone, and I think it would be a fun one to play with friends for a movie night precisely because it works best as a horror film with audience participation.