The Legend Of Coffin Rock game had a tough act to follow. While it broke little new ground, the first title in the Blair Witch game series, Rustin Parr, made excellent use of the Nocturne engine and had an interesting and well-told story that involved a good deal of character interaction and fair number of genuinely frightening moments. Sadly, Coffin Rock fails to follow this tough act, and doesn't quite meet the standard set by the previous title.

Coffin Rock actually acts as a prequel to the first Blair Witch game, set 55 years later. The mysterious man named Lazarus was mentioned in the first title, and for this prequel set in 1886 you actually get to play him. Waking up with amnesia, Lazarus is given the task of finding Robin Weaver, who has disappeared into those oh-so scary woods near Burkitsville, Maryland. And so the game begins.

From the outset it's clear that Coffin Rock is a very different game to Rustin Parr, and this is both a good and bad thing. Visually it both pleases and disappoints. The woods feel somehow more convincing than they did in the previous title, yet at the same time they feel a lot less scary thanks to an almost complete lack of shadow and darkness that both Nocturne and the first Blair Witch game made such excellent use of. While developers Terminal Reality created a highly detailed and convincing version of the town of Burkitsville, all we see of the town in Coffin Rock is the Historical Society building sitting on its own surrounded by woods. I assume the rest of the town must have oddly sprung up around it later on. Other disparities become evident as you progress through the game, such as ghosts that can be shot with bullets when only a Charged Radiance Emitter could harm these ethereal foes in the previous game. Oddest of all, the Twana (those odd, man shaped stick figures from the film) are used to heal damage rather than the completely different purpose they served in the first Blair Witch game. One final noticeable difference between the titles is a lack of an about-face key, something that often made moving about in Rustin Parr much easier. There was clearly some communication between the different developers of these two Blair Witch titles, but it wasn't enough as evidenced by these glaring factual conflicts.