Topic: Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition (Switch eShop) Review

[Halbred]

Is it, though? Is it really?

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/60904/blade-runner-enhanced-edition-switch-eshop-review

Night Dive Studios is well-known for their excellent work remastering old games: Turok: Dinosaurs Hunter, Turok 2, Shadowman, DOOM 64, and Quake have all benefited tremendously from their considered approach to games preservation, taking a largely hands-off approach to present these titles as they were intended with some added quality-of-life updates. In Turok 2, for example, they added the ability to warp between levels–especially handy if you’re trying to find all the Sacred Eagle Feathers. In Shadowman, they re-integrated a bunch of content cut from the original game due to space limitations. In Quake, they’ve added all sorts of game mods, including Quake 64. I was excited to try their recent Enhanced Edition of Blade Runner, a PC adventure game from 1997, but I’m sad to report that it’s a disappointment.

Blade Runner is notable for a lot of reasons, most notably that, due to a Gordian knot of licensing issues, developer Westwood Studios was unable to create a strict adaptation of the 1982 film. Instead, they crafted a parallel story that references, but doesn’t directly intercede with, the movie. While some excerpts are included, for the most part all of the music and art are original, as are the lines read by returning actors (like Sean Young). It was also unique in featuring a large number of random elements that made every playthrough feel different, including which of the game’s suspects are Replicants.

You take the role of a Blade Runner named Ray McCoy as he initially investigates a rash of Replicant crimes in Los Angeles, including the slaughter of several live and/or replicated animals, but he’s quickly embroiled in LA’s criminal underworld and the Replicants’ attempts to extend their lifespans. The game has thirteen different endings based on the player’s actions and the random occurrences in each playthrough.

Blade Runner plays like an atypical adventure game, with McCoy exploring various locations, finding clues, and talking to witnesses. He can give the Voight-Kampff test to suspects, although exactly how to use the test effectively is never explained. You can also have Ray unholster his gun and fire on Replicants or normal people (never a good idea to accidentally kill a human), but Ray has limited ammunition and “chinyins” (money) that you need to keep track of.

I recently rewatched Blade Runner to refresh my memory of the film and forgot that it’s abysmally dull, but I was surprised to see how many actors and locations are carried forward to the game, in some cases replicating location shots to a “T” (like the Bradbury Building).

The skeleton of this game is strong, with a good script and recognizable voices (like Lisa Edelstein and Jeff Garlin) and some actors reprising their roles from the 1982 film (Sean Young, James Hong, etc.). The plot is entertaining and presents a different perspective on the world of Blade Runner, expanding on the movie’s version of L.A. and its residents, as well as more information from some of the film’s characters, like J. F. Sebastian, and its criminal underworld.

I imagine that, in 1997, Blade Runner was very pretty, but in 2022 it looks pretty rough. Character models are presented as digitized computer models (a la Mortal Kombat or Donkey Kong Country) wandering through painted, 2D backdrops. It never really works, and some of the environmental effects, like fog or lighting, don’t affect the character models. The game is far darker (in terms of lighting) than any game I’ve played; to the point where clues or evidence in a given location may be completely invisible, like a piece of cheese or a photograph. The only way to really be sure that you’ve laid eyes on everything is by going over every centimeter of the screen with your cursor, waiting for it to change from white to green. Even then, some clues are so tiny that you may repeatedly miss them. Things just look too blurry; there are no clear delineations between background objects. Playing this game in Handheld mode definitely magnifies this issue, and I don’t recommend it, as you’ll miss a lot of visual clues scattered in some environments.

I found it bizarre that there is no “brightness” setting in the Options menu, and in fact the total options available are frustratingly slim. My previous Night Dive experience anticipated a wealth of options being present, so it’s strange that Blade Runner is so barebones.

Ray can also toggle his firearm with the B button, but aside from shooting suspects, I was never really sure what it could do until I learned (by accident) that you can use it to shoot environmental objects, like handcuffs or locked doors. This would’ve been useful information, along with some kind of tutorial about how to use the Voight-Kampff test correctly.

Another issue I had was with the game’s K.I.A. system, which compiles all the clues, interviews, and evidence which you can look at anytime by pressing the Minus button. Updating your K.I.A. database at the police station may give you additional clues. However, K.I.A. is unwieldy, and I was never comfortable with how it organized the evidence. The game’s ESPER system, in which you zoom in on collected photographs, is kind of cool (it works just like it does in the movie) but, again, the game’s extremely dark palette screws with your sense of what you’re looking for. In one of the first photos you come across, you’re supposed to zoom in on a pink-haired girl, but for some reason, the developers chose to put her entire body behind another object and if you didn’t know she was there already, the complete lack of lighting rendered her completely invisible.

I would have appreciated a “how to play” tutorial option from the menu, or even a scan of the original instruction booklet, to ease me into the game’s systems. I should also warn that the game does not auto-save, so save often because Ray can actually die, and you’ll be sent back to your last save point. I lost almost two hours of progress at one point because I assumed that, in 2022, the game was auto-saving.

One other knock against Blade Runner is that it’s buggy. If you turn on subtitles, which I always do now because I’m old, you may be annoyed to find that subtitles don’t appear during cutscenes. There were a couple instances of photographs just not being transferred to ESPER. I picked up a fish scale and expected to get information about it from the fish market saleslady, but she never brought it up. Puzzled, I went into K.I.A. and discovered it just wasn’t there at all.

In trying to determine whether these problems were present in the original PC release, I discovered that Night Dive actually had to reverse-engineer Blade Runner because the original game code had been lost a long time ago. There was a fan-created version using ScummVM that was apparently quite faithful to the original 1997 release, and Night Dive actually added that version in a free update to the Enhanced Edition’s Steam version. I can only hope it’s also added to consoles, because I’d love to play what’s apparently considered a superior rebuild. Screenshot comparisons of ScummVM vs. Enhanced Edition suggest that the latter smooths over the backgrounds, resulting in smeared, muddy images compared to the former.

I can’t recommend Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition, at least not in its present form. There are too many annoyances, too many unexplained systems, and not nearly enough lighting. If you really must check this out, I suggest leaving a FAQ open on your phone.