Games based on movies. They've got quite the stigma, haven't they? Notorious for being a swing and a miss in the vast majority of cases, it's a rarity to find one worth talking about in a positive light. On the overcast streets of a (now near) future Los Angeles are neon lights and signs of hope - hope that Blade Runner plays as good as it looks because it looks bloody fantastic.
Set parallel to the movie of the same name, Blade Runner follows Ray McCoy on the hunt for Replicants in a point-and-click adventure that weaves in and out of the plot from the movie, but still exists as separate from it.
Get your Voight-Kampff tests ready, because we're going to retire some Replicants.
Fun Times
Are you seeing what I'm seeing? I'm seeing motion-captured actors stuck into shots seemingly lifted straight out of the Blade Runner film reel. I'm seeing detailed character models and lighting. I'm seeing a pre-rendered intro movie, sure, but I am liking what I'm seeing and that is the point.
Blade Runner does not mess around when it comes to fitting seamlessly into the setting of the film. Every little detail has been paid attention to, to the point of working with various crew members from the film in order to pin down just what it is that made Blade Runner look the way it did. It doesn't take a lot of effort to imagine the story of this game taking place just a few streets down from the story of Rick Deckard.
What does take a lot of effort is getting the game going on modern systems. To see this first interactive screen was a joy because it meant everything had worked. The game is freely available but it took a YouTube video to complete the task of installing it. The question of updating it for modern systems, or rereleasing it on the likes of GOG and Steam comes up often, but is answered with "the source code is long since lost", and "we don't have the rights if we found it again".
But it is playable, and you need to play it.
In essence, Blade Runner is a cinematic view and a coloured pointer. You don't always see the pointer, and it's bloody fantastic.
It's a point and click adventure, so you're required to interact with people of interest, whose dialogue choices will expand as and when you find new items of interest by poking around the screen for anything that looks like it's evidence for the crime.
But you don't necessarily have choices in dialogue, especially by default. In the menus, you can choose what tone Ray will speak to everybody with, and you have the option of having a menu to choose topics from, but other than that, you simply don't need to choose from anything hovering over the action in a text box.
Clicking on someone will ask them a question. Clicking on them again will probably ask them another question. Clicking on some piece of evidence and then clicking on someone will probably ask them yet another question, and that's the gist of interaction.
What do I mean by that, exactly?
Touted as a real-time 3D adventure, rather than a point and click, the Blade Runner inhabitants will go about their business trying to achieve whatever goal it is they've been given. The Replicants will want to do replicant things, probably, so if you take your time in one location, they may have moved ahead of where you expected them to be by the time you moved on.
That sounds both too good to be true and too difficult to make a game around, but somehow it works like that, and that's not even the cool part.
At the start of each game, thirteen of the fifteen characters directly involved in the plot are randomly assigned the status of human or Replicant, and it's all on you to work out who is who and deal with them accordingly. Your job is to retire Replicants, but you can side with them and let them go free if you want to. You ought not to kill any humans, obviously, but if you yourself are a replicant, then shit happens, eh?
The game is so tightly knit that even walkthroughs are full of 'if this happened, then this will happen, otherwise this will happen at that point instead'. Following them is harder than just stumbling into things sometimes.
And stumble around I did, letting the graphics and the gameplay sweep me up.
Your first task is investigating animal murders, and the act will wrap up when you've run out of things to ask people, essentially. Who are the killers? Are they replicants? Why did they want to murder a bunch of pets? What's the bigger picture here?
Go back to the Police HQ and you can even sync up your clues with the clues other detectives have found in their own cases as time goes by, and I bet they're linked to yours somehow...
Frustrations
Sometimes, point and click adventures go and point-and-click on you, and hitting a roadblock can bring the game grinding to a halt.
I knew this chef, Zuban, was a suspect. He had been working as a chef for only a month, and the animal killers used a butchers knife, and one of them had a bit of a limp. I just needed the right prompt to trigger the next line of questioning of him, and in turn, propel the story into the next chapter, but I just couldn't work out what I'd missed.
Luckily, I managed to piece together what was needed from a guide (a couple of bits of evidence I'd missed) and things got going once more, into potential combat, no less.
Further Fun Times
Just as the interaction was driven by the left mouse button and little else, combat was driven by switching into the combat mode with the right mouse button and then firing your weapon with the left. Only I had let a fat replicant chef give me the slip and has lost my suspect.
Not for long, however, for he was waiting for me when I got home - a clear case of 'if this didn't happen here, it'll happen there' if ever I saw one.
Further Frustrations
This was my only view of this scene. The night looked lovely, with the fan cutting up the shafts of light and the searchlight rotating through the skies. In the distance were two tiny figures, attacking each other until one was dead.
When I had finally retired the Replicant, a bloke with a walking stick slowly made his way from the very bottom of the screen to the middle in order to tell me some words of wisdom. I think he was obscured by another light source during this conversation.
When Blade Runner looks great, it shines. When characters awkwardly stand in front of each other or look a little too different from their surroundings, it turns into a game again. If you're looking for faults, you'll find them, but more often than not you willfully ignore them.
Final Word
I had finished the first act and was loving it. Sure, it can be hard to know whether you're doing the right thing or have found all you need to find, but it looks so good that I really was playing it as though I was Ray, bumbling through the case.
I'd go here, I'd go there, I'd not have seen this or that unless I was prompted. It was a point-and-click adventure I wanted to keep playing, and it had none of the interface or ridiculous puzzles that would always get in my way. Next up is some murder of someone by someone else in a pink room, so that'll be fun...
Blade Runner isn't perfect and shows its age if you look at it in the wrong way, but then you see a scene from the movie and you have to hand it to the developers for caring this much about the world and everything in it.
The idea that every playthrough is different is hard to pull off in many games, and to do so within the context of the story is even harder than just mixing some stats or dialogue choices. There are a handful of possible endings depending on your actions, and while they could be divided into 'good' or 'bad' endings, they aren't so obvious - you might just have shot the wrong person and things took quite a bad turn thereafter.
I've had a playthrough of Blade Runner going on out of the corner of my eye as I write this, and I've managed to spoil none of it, save for there being some fantastic looking locations to run around in. I don't know where the story goes, but then even if I did, what are the chances that the replicants in this playthrough are also replicants in my game?
It is as though the developers came to terms with the fact that no game could capture the ideas presented in Blade Runner as well as the film did, but then made the game anyway and it was just as great. Except it was based on a book, right? So that was probably pretty good too.
The point is, Blade Runner is a must play. It's a hidden gem that I had absolutely no knowledge of, and it has shot to the top of the 'gotta get back to this one soon' list. You won't be disappointed.
Fun Facts
The Voight-Kampff test can be conducted in-game in certain situations, and not only can it reveal who is and isn't a replicant, but you can even fix the test to return results in your favour. Attention to detail or attention to detail?
Blade Runner, developed by Westwood Studios, first released in 1997.
Version played: PC, 1997.
Version watched: PC, 1997 (World of Longplays)