A review of Blade Runner, Westwood's 1997 adventure game

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Surprisingly, the game’s story actually works really well within the Blade Runner movie. It takes place at the same time without crossing over too much. It uses the old movie locations well. The game’s new locations are mostly well done but some clash a little with the movie’s aesthetic. It takes the movie’s music and sounds and uses them quite well, notably in the scene transitions and in the esper sequences. It stretches believability a little to have the two stories take place at the same time, especially when characters from the movie come in. Tyrell, Rachel, Leon, J.F. Sebastian and Chew all make basically cameo appearances, and all are voiced by the same actors as in the movie. But on the whole it works as a Blade Runner game.

One thing the game did do really well that other adventure games failed miserably at was having decent, logical puzzles with multiple solutions. You could still get stuck sometimes, but it mostly went pretty smoothly. And the game had a sliding scale of success for some puzzles, allowing you to press forward if you just wanted to progress but if you were really thorough you could see places and people that those speedrunners would miss. Another thing the game really excelled at were the multiple endings and allowing player expression, but I already made a whole video about that so won’t go into detail here.

One of the more original things it brought to the adventure game genre was combat and action. The game asks you several times to run or dodge from danger, but this is super awkward and it’s very hard to even know the game is asking you to do it. Most players would never even figure out that you can dodge Zuben’s hot soup attack in the opening chapter. But I really liked the fact that the combat was a sometimes-there event. Even now in most games with guns you have the gun out at all times, but in Blade Runner it spent most of the time in the holster, so drawing it out with the right mouse button was a real event. You could do it at any time and in certain situations characters would react appropriately, for example by coughing up more information or running away. But the problem was that the majority of the time they didn’t react at all, and you just stood there feeling silly with your gun out at a Chinese restaurant for no reason and with no effect on anything.

The second new thing to the genre was introducing replayability through randomness. The game actually randomly generates several story beats – for example which characters are replicants. One guy can be a replicant in one game and a human in another. Along with the multiple endings, the idea behind it was that you could replay the game and things would be different. But this fell flat for several reasons:

1. It’s highly unlikely anyone would replay the game. The story is worth replaying but all the puzzles and other elements are mostly the same every time. So the second time through you know exactly what you have to do so it’s a chore instead of an investigation.

2. It’s possible to play the whole game without realizing it was random. I didn’t when I first played it. It wasn’t mentioned anywhere, so unless you went online and checked in 1997 you really had no idea things in the game can be randomized each time.

3. The game doesn’t allow you to make mistakes. It won’t let you shoot Dektora if she’s human, but if she’s a rep you can. Takes all the risk and reward out of it.

4. This system actually decreased player choice. You can only romance replicant characters in the game, and if the one you like is human, there’s no romance ending for you.

The final new thing Blade Runner brought to the table was choice in romance. Years before Mass Effect, it featured multiple … okay, well, two different characters you could romance. But the romances either really feel empty or just plain wrong. Dektora falls in love with you after a single conversation about nothing and Lucy ... well … the game spells out in no uncertain terms that she is a 14 year old girl who has been sexually abused by at least one and probably two of the older men in the game already. So yeah, you can make it a third if you really want to. I dunno, maybe I shouldn’t be too hard on the game for this Lolita ending. Even though the protagonist is clearly older, in 1997 I was only a teenager myself, and in the 90s it was generally assumed that most gamers fit into the 13-18 male demographic, a more appropriate age for dating a teenage girl. But on screen it still looks creepy as hell to see a 14 year old emo kid profess her love for a 30 year old detective shortly before they drive off into the sunset together.

Blade Runner had a great story and decent puzzles, but it was a highly ambitious game that could never really hit the targets it set for itself. It came really late back when adventure games had first started to die off, and it attempted to do several new and highly original things to revive the genre but only half succeeded at them. I suspect the game was sent out the door early with only some of it working really well and a lot of cut content. The sheer number of completely empty environments with absolutely nothing to do in them except move along is perhaps evidence for this.

As a massive Blade Runner nut and adventure game fan I really enjoyed the game back in the day. But I can’t really recommend it now unless you fit into at least one or probably both of those categories.