Being a game from 1997, it's rather unfair to judge it by standards and perspective of 2022(!), but it's hard to completely ignore.
I'll admit I did not play it back in the day, and actually got into the Blade Runner universe by the latest movie, which led me to watch the original movie as well (Which I loved!) - and in turn led me to check out the video game.
The good news is thatBeing a game from 1997, it's rather unfair to judge it by standards and perspective of 2022(!), but it's hard to completely ignore.
I'll admit I did not play it back in the day, and actually got into the Blade Runner universe by the latest movie, which led me to watch the original movie as well (Which I loved!) - and in turn led me to check out the video game.
The good news is that the game is honestly a great addition to the Blade Runner universe. It's not strictly based on the movie, but rather tells a side story, BUT it captured beautifully the movie's vibe - be it the soundtrack, the visual style of Blade Runner's futuristic take on the world, the characters and the writing, it's all very high quality, even up to this day - which is great.
I was specifically impressed by the graphics and the backgrounds. While this is obviously a very old game and you should probably lower your expectations on that aspect, I personally still went ahead and gave the game a shot on my TV screen, and I think it actually looks beautiful even when scaled up on ScummVM. The character models are understandable rather ugly, but the entire environment and places you explore totally make up for it, in my opinion.
The main problem is that the gameplay did not age well. This is a semi-traditional point&click, in the sense that there the (in)famous inventory puzzles are not really there. You do collect evidence, but to progress you usually just have to have to right item at the right time. This leaves us primarily focused on walking and talking to people.
I think this is a good thing since it simplifies gameplay a bit. While Blade Runner is not a necessarily difficult game, it suffers like many games of that time&genre of the need to pixel hunt, which is never really fun in my opinion. You'll also have to save often because you CAN die and can, on rare occasions, reach a dead end.
The gameplay has also nice gimmicks to it which are the opportunities to run Voigt Kumpf (excuse my spelling) test and use the "image enhancer" seen in the movie to find clues within images.
These are actually great additions and are very well done, but still has the same problem with the main gameplay, which is, that at many times you won't actually have any idea what to look for.
As I said, the game is not so hard, in the sense that the puzzles are rather logical and there aren't crazy and illogical puzzles. Still, pixel hunting and random events make it still very hard to progress on you on, from time to time.
Last point to mention is that the game has a very impressive set of random events and multiple outcomes (for a game of the late nineties). This would have greatly increased replayability value considering you have the time and patience to play the game again and actually look for the content.
Unfortunately, for reasons I mentioned above the game ends up to be more of a chore, in my opinion, and therefore this does not save the game, at least when looking at it from the perspective of years after.
Gave it 7 since this is still a very high quality content on many other aspects.… Expand
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