You Should Play Blade Runner

Blade Runner is an incredible film. It is an experiment that fell out of a time warp, from some other place where a movie is allowed to take its time and present complex ideas and characters without expecting its audience to walk away with a clear and defined opinion once the credits roll. It is a work that takes time to engage with. It will awe with set pieces that still look incredible, it will establish a full and realized world, and it will make you wonder what the point of anything was. Is our main character who he thinks he is? Forget that, is he even likable?

Phillip Dick’s original novel, in many ways, appears streamlined when compared to its film adaptation. The two are almost foreign to one another. Blade Runner’s greatest strength as a movie, especially so long after its release, is that it is very much its own thing. It took a mold and forced itself into it, but that mold cracked. And the result was something that looks kind of like what it was poured into, but also not. The movie is so reliant on sight and sound to tell its story that it is a much more difficult work to attach yourself to than Dick’s novel ever was. Even with today’s artificial intelligence and more advanced theories of gamification and design, it would be difficult to properly capture what made Blade Runner Blade Runner in a video game.

Which is why it is so mind-blowing that Westwood Studios, the people who brought Command and Conquer to the world, managed to do it in the same year that Crash Bandicoot 2 released.

Quick note before we really get into the meat and potatoes here, this game used to be a real pain to play. You’d have to track down a retail copy (or find a zip file that fell off a truck) and also download a couple external patches to get everything to operate correctly on modern hardware. I won’t get too deep into it, but part of the game was tied to the CPU clock speed. So a modern CPU being exponentially faster than one from 1997 was a problem and would cause certain bits of the game to be unplayable. People out there did the work to keep it alive for a long time, though, and they deserve a lot of credit for keeping the game in a playable state while the people who held the rights to it kind of doddered around for two decades. So if you have time, check out the website that pushed those updates out. Here’s a link.

Thankfully you don’t have to go through all of that junk anymore and can just install and play the game like a normal piece of 21st century software. In December 2019, just in time to barely miss the setting of the game, GOG released Blade Runner on their storefront and that is absolutely the version you want to play. But if you want subtitles, you still have to download a file to add them since they were never officially supported. For whatever reason. Nobody reads in the future, I guess.

Okay, we’ve got that sorted. Let’s get to it.

Blade Runner, that is Blade Runner: The Video Game, is a point and click adventure from 1997 that released exclusively on PC. Rather than try to adapt the film’s storyline into a game, Westwood opted to tell a new story set in that same universe. But they stayed close enough to the source material that the plot happens alongside the events of the movie.

You take control of Ray McCoy, a rookie Blade Runner who has just joined the Los Angeles Rep detect unit. You’ve been given a lot of false leads and grunt work while you pay your dues, but because there’s no one else to take on what looks like a real Replicant attack, you’re finally given a case. A store selling living animals, as opposed to replicated ones, was hit and it is up to you to get down there, figure out if the perps really were Reps, and, if they were, retire them.

From the beginning, the game goes for a different narrative feel than the movie and I really appreciate that. Rick Deckard was called in to handle a special case, but Ray is just a guy nobody really respects and is the last option. You can run into two of the other Blade Runners as you proceed through the game and they both think of you as a kid. Gaff, who showed up in the movie, is a pro looking at a rookie and Steele, the tough-as-nails lady who is always smoking shows you at least some professional courtesy, but makes it clear you’d better not get in her way. It’s a great way to thrust a player into the bizarre world that Blade Runner sets itself in. McCoy knows the ropes, sure, but he’s no pro. So the player isn’t expected to know everything from the onset and is put in the unique position of being able to succeed or fail at various points throughout the game and the plot continue either way.

Don’t get me wrong, Blade Runner is a 90s adventure game through and through. You’re going to die and it’s going to happen a lot. You can definitely miss certain things and feel stuck, but I never found myself having screwed up so thoroughly that I was unable to progress. Sometimes it took beating my head against a wall (or checking out a really thorough and interesting walkthrough that I’ll link to here), but I didn’t ruin a save at any point by not playing the “right way.” I’ve seen some complaints about that happening online but I can’t verify them at all so take that with a grain of salt. And save often. You’ll want to do that anyway.

Take, for example, an early confrontation with a suspected Replicant. Clues I gathered at the initial crime scene suggest some kind of connection to a Chinese restaurant. I go there and talk to the owner who tells me that his new chef has only been around for a month. Okay, there’s something right there. I go out back to talk directly with the chef and ask him about the suspect I had originally been tailing. He says he doesn’t know her. But I want to Voigt-Kampff the guy and see if he’s human or Replicant. He freaks out and tries to escape.

Initially, I didn’t know this was going to happen and his diversionary tactic of throwing a pot full of future-sushi at me works. I hit the ground and he escapes down an alley. I can pursue him all the way to a locked door, but ultimately, he’s gone. I wasn’t fast enough and now the story involves a suspect that managed to escape.

Rewind that scenario and this time I know the pot is coming, so I react and manage to avoid slipping. I follow after him down the same alleyway as before and again, find myself at a locked door. The difference is that this time, the perp has set an ambush for me. He falls down from above and approaches me with his knife drawn. I put him down.

Both of these options continue the narrative, as does a third option of holstering your weapon during the ambush and trying to talk to the guy. None of the possible actions put you on a path that is inherently better or worse than another. You just have to decide how to handle the situations as they present themselves. Improvise. Like a detective working the beat.

That’s one area Blade Runner excels in where a lot of other games don’t. The constant barrage of information and clues puts you in the role of a detective instead of something like, say, LA Noire, where you are forced down a fairly linear path to your perpetrator. This overhead RPG called Disco Elysium came out earlier in 2019 and really got me thinking about how games try to make players feel like they can solve a mystery that ultimately already has a solution. See, in real life, some mysteries never get solved. The information is just too obstructed or outright doesn’t exist. But in a game, if solving it is possible at all, you know that you can succeed because all of the relevant parts are present and controlled. It’s a difficult thing to capture in an interactive medium and oftentimes that idea gets sidelined in favor of a larger, more linear narrative. LA Noire is especially guilty of this as everything you do ends up being part of this background story that has almost no relevancy to the individual cases. Disco Elysium is all about adapting pen and paper mechanics to a detective scenario and making the possible mutations of what the players does skew off in as many directions as possible. Blade Runner isn’t that deep, but it is respectable. Here, players are ultimately presented with three major endings that can change a bit based on what the player does, but a lot of how you get there involves figuring things out. You have to piece together where to go and who to pursue based on the information you gather.

Sometimes that information is pretty obtuse, though. It can be almost impossible to see some items in a crime scene or know that you can pick them up. On top of that, there are some frustratingly specific ways the game wants you to discover information that just ends up obfuscating it entirely. For example, there are several photos you can find throughout the game than can be interacted with like Deckard does in the movie. You use this specific computer system called an ESPER to feed in a photo and “enhance” it for more detail. How it works isn’t really clear and it can sometimes even show you data that is definitely not visible in a photo but we shouldn’t worry too much about how the camera can turn a two-dimensional photo into a 3D space and give me exact details of spots it definitely could not see. One of the first photos you get includes some pretty key information about your initial investigation. You can zoom into the perpetrator’s face to learn what the guy you’re tailing looks like and you can also zoom in on the car parked outside to get some info on that. But more importantly, the license plate on that car is visible. But you have to be really specific with what you highlight in the ESPER for it to zoom in on that and give you that info instead of just highlighting the car again. It’s one of those things that is really neat in theory and works as an interactive thing lifted from the source material, but in practice it is too finicky to make you feel like you’re in control.

More than that, you can lock yourself out of some pretty important information just by not reading the manual. See, Blade Runner has a personality system. Nothing in the game explains it to you or really makes a lot of sense, but it’s there. And it’s on by default, so you’ve got to opt out. In the menu, there are these radio buttons with pictures of McCoy’s face. If you hover over them, you get little descriptors like Polite or Erratic, but no explanation. Blade Runner has simple dialogue trees and choosing one of these options will determine how McCoy will generally interact with people by auto-selecting dialogue choices for you based on the personality trait you have selected. I think it’s supposed to make the whole game feel more cinematic, but it just ends up being this weird idea that isn’t fully fleshed out. Trust me, you definitely want to select “User Choice” and pick stuff yourself. Sometimes characters will react poorly to certain topics and not want to talk to you anymore or they may only give you so much time in which to talk to them. If you’re not choosing what to say, it can feel like Ray is fighting against you and that’s no good.

But none of these issues detract from the overall pleasure of an experience that Blade Runner can be. If you’re willing to be patient with it (or to use the FAQ I mentioned earlier), what lies at the heart of the piece is this exploration of the human vs. Replicant idea that Phillip Dick and Ridley Scott both expounded on in different ways. Ultimately, the video game adaptation of Blade Runner is an amazing example of just that: an adaptation. It takes the same world and the same core conceit, but navigates it differently than the pieces you may already be familiar with. The organic/mechanic dichotomy is not foreign to media, especially games. The Mass Effect trilogy and Deus Ex prequels stand as much more prolific examples that adventure into that very same territory. But Blade Runner, with a less choice-defined narrative than those games, had the freedom to make a more thorough statement over the course of the adventure. At the end, the player is left in a place where they may not have clearest idea of how they should feel about what they have done. And capturing that feeling, a feeling that is at the heart of the Blade Runner film’s value, is an incredibly difficult mission to accomplish. But the game, even with its occasional stumbling, does an excellent job of it.

It is the sort of game that there are not other examples of. You can point to experiences that have tried similar ideas or attempted to capture that feeling in their own ways, but nothing stands up as professionally as Westwood’s little adventure game does. They managed to not just do right by the name, but to expand upon the value that it promises. And that is why you should play Blade Runner...