Blade Runner

"A Truly Amazing Experience."

Blade Runner was a game I had fairly high expectations for. I absolutely loved the 1982 movie; it is, in my opinion, one of the greatest SciFi movies ever created. Five years ago, I had found a copy of the game, and purchased it, hoping that the game would live up to the film legacy that spawned it.

I am happy to say it does.

However, Blade Runner is not truly a game based upon the movie. Rather, it is a game that exists in the same universe as the motion picture. It shares many of the same characters (almost all of which have their voices provided by the actual movie actors), and takes place at the same time as the movie, but Blade Runner has it’s own vastly complicated story to tell; a story that often parallels plot details found in Philip K. Dick’s short novella, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”. Blade Runner is a remarkable masterpiece of a game, and one far to often overlooked.

Gameplay: Blade Runner is much more of a Graphical Adventure more than anything else. A majority of time in the game is spent interacting with various characters and gather clues. Talking with characters is as interesting as you want it to be, as the game has five different settings that deal with character interaction. Four of them approach the dialogue trees in unique ways, by presenting your demeanor as Polite, Kind, Surly, and Neutral, thus eliciting different responses from different characters. The fifth allows you to view dialogue options and choose as you will. The main gameplay aspect is the cause-effect relationship to nearly everything you do while playing. Blade Runner boasts twelve different endings, though research has indicated that after six years, no one has found them all. Literally everything you do in the game effects how events unfold. Your choices will sometimes mean that different people in the game are replicants, or perhaps they aren’t. Different dialogue choices can and will result in the death of different characters. I’ve only gotten four endings so far, and the experience through the game has been quite different each time I played. The game is not very long though. After you have played through the game once, you can get through it again in only a few hours.

Audio: Astounding. As previously mentioned, many of the movie actors have returned to lend their voices to the game, enriching the overall atmosphere immensely. The voice acting in the game is extremely well done by all parties, and is some of the best I have heard in a video game. Each character is distinct, and all carry themselves well through the game. There is not much music in the game, and what music there is comes mostly from the music itself. Surprisingly, the lack of music does not hurt the game much, if at all, due to the sheer amount of ambient sound present in the game. There is never a truly quite moment. You will constantly hear the games being played in an arcade, people talking in a nightclub, the scurrying of rodents and drip of water in sewers. The audio is very well done.

Graphics: The pre-rendered backgrounds are very well done, even after all these years. All environments are constantly active. People move in the background. Lights flicker. Water drips. Cars fly in between buildings. These environments project the bleak, rain-filled world of the movie Blade Runner extremely well. Many locations are lifted from the movie and flawlessly reproduced. The characters themselves, however, fare worse over time. Pixelation is extreme, and can bring the experience down if you let it. On the plus side, however, the motion capture was well done, and the characters have realistic motion throughout the course of the game.

Blade Runner is an excellent masterpiece, and an overlooked inspiration to games such as Enter the Matrix today. It is a game completely worth your time, and you can likely find it cheap, if you can find it. Buy this game, and enjoy it.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 09/02/03