Cyberpunk is an inherently old-fashioned genre. Its iconic works draw on futuristic ideas that have either become unremarkable, like essential spheres of life based on tech owned by megalomaniacal corporations, or been superseded, like an obsession with cybernetic enhancements instead of codified social status. Video games, though, are somewhere these concepts have played out vividly. So an old-fashioned video game about a cyberpunk classic is something that makes sense.
In its own little way, Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition is a perfectly authentic nugget of the genre. However, in this cyberpunk story, we players are the neon-mohawked, robot-armed gutter-sludge gang-grunts trampled down by the money-sucking Big Business Corp (here played by Nightdive Studios), and Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition is one of the pellets of barely nutritional crud said Corp scatters into the storm drains for us to stay just alive enough that we can be leeched of blood to lubricate the cyborgs that drive the pellet-scattering hover trucks. It’s kippleware – software detritus that has come about spontaneously in the current epidemic of remake/remaster/rerelease/re-profit.
If that sounds kind of great, then you must be a true cyberpunk dreamer who revels in the nihilism of techno-commercial dystopia – who puts the 'punk' into cyberpunk. Lap up your kippleware because this is as good as it gets – but any value to be had in the Switch version of Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition comes from one of two sources: the underlying quality of the original game (which is already dubious) or masochistic delectation in the sheer cash-grabbing brazenness of this inferior release.
Blade Runner originally came to PC in 1997, from Westwood Studios, amidst the enormous success of the Command & Conquer series of real-time strategy games. They brought some of that experience with them, casting Blade Runner as a “real-time” adventure, where the game world would progress independently of player actions. Blade Runner shared back, too, with its voxel-style approach to 3D characters carried over to later C&C entries. There was a lot of talk about these gimmicks at the time and, although they transpired to be more style than substance, their inherent shortcomings sit a little differently when considered today, and curiosity about the original game will be rewarded with a unique retro-future vibe.
It’s the vibe, the style, that pervades everything else in this game. The cutscenes are well-rendered and animated to CD-ROM-boom standards, recreating locations and technology from the 1982 film. Protagonist Ray McCoy’s apartment closely resembles the one Harrison Ford sat in as fellow blade runner Rick Deckard, and you can zoom and enhance photos on your sofa just like Deckard does in the film. Elsewhere, there is a movie-authentic Voigt-Kampff machine, which you can use to grill subjects and uncover and eliminate replicants, the androids it is your job to “retire”. The soundscapes throughout are sumptuous, with music matching the movie’s mood, and street-bustle and machine-hum laying a foundation for incidental effects located around the scene through the stereo channels.
The plot tracks closely alongside the film, with replicants on the run, visits to the ominous Tyrell Corporation, plodding neon-dripped alleys, and getting chewed out by the department chief. There’s point-and-click gun action (all moving the cursor with the thumb stick), but it’s mainly detective work, interviewing witnesses, collecting and analysing evidence, and watching the plot thicken.
As with any graphic adventure of the era, there are moments of pixel hunting and “try-everything-with-everything” puzzle-solving. The “real-time” idea tends to frustrate here. If scenes are changing without player input, then you can’t try everything without then having to try it again in case you missed a key event. “Exhaust all options” isn’t much fun at the best of times, but when you can’t delimit all the options it’s painful.
Looking back on this 1997 work, some of the problems are palatable. The hassle of untangling real-time options can be shortened with a walkthrough (although the Enhanced Edition neglects to add any kind of hints to the game itself), while the odd mingling of low-res voxel character models and high-fidelity pre-rendered backgrounds is less uneven when the standards of “high-fidelity” have changed and it all looks a bit janky one way or another. In short, it’s a game well worth revisiting.
So far, though, we’ve been talking about the elements of the original Blade Runner that have remained mostly intact in Nightdive’s Enhanced Edition on Switch. Unfortunately, apart from some improved frame rates, this Enhanced Edition is worse than the original – worse in ways you wouldn’t believe possible. Truly talented imaginations have clearly been applied to invent ways to ruin aspects of the game that you would have thought were out of reach.
The backgrounds have been smudged about a bit as a nod towards upscaling. Nightdive apparently didn’t have access to the source assets for the pre-rendered backgrounds, or they could have been remastered crisply at higher resolutions. Instead, they’re smoothed in a way that diminishes detail. With the Switch docked, this is bearable, since some crunchy artefacts like heavy dithering are still very visible on a big screen, which lets the low-res character models sit a little less jarringly against the backgrounds. However, handheld, those spiky voxels jag out so harshly across the backdrop sludge that you just wish Nightdive had left it all a bit boxier – as it was.
The shooting mechanic was always oddly interleaved with the rest of the game, as were ammo and money management. However, it is all much worse for having no instructions whatsoever and completely unreliable controls. The same goes for the Voigt-Kampff machine, which has zero explanation and a control panel confused by the overall inconstancy of interfaces in this new edition.
Finally, and most egregiously by a thousand miles, Nightdive has revised the menus and the “KIA” interface used by McCoy to manage and interrogate his collection of evidence. Instead of letting the player manipulate the original interface – which is still displayed on the screen! – you are forced to use an absurdly convoluted array of context-dependent controller mappings to manipulate a crude PowerPoint mock-up of a text interface that’s just overlaid on the original graphics. This is a core part of the game and a huge contributor to the feeling of playing detective and solving a case. In the Enhanced Edition (“Enhanced”! The gall!), it is something you just don’t ever want to see – but you will because McCoy will regularly walk in front of your cursor and cause you to open it in error.
Conclusion
Many will see the score at the bottom of this review and immediately write off Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition. However, there is something genuinely brilliant buried deep inside this Switch release, beneath the lingering issues with pacing and narrative design as well as the myriad painful “enhancements” Nightdive Studios has dumped on top. To cut through all that, you will need a great love for Blade Runner and cyberpunk, saintly patience, a walkthrough on hand, a strict requirement to play on console rather than PC, and a pair of rose-tinted glasses. If you have all those things then you may still see life in this game’s eyes, but we don’t need a Voigt-Kampff machine to tell this version from the real thing.
Comments 41
nooooooh only a 5. I might still get this at some point. This was meant to be not remakeable due to its weird rights-situation and I believe the whole situation of the format/code of the old game was pretty crazy (they might have had to backwards engineer it together or something)
However I've been thinking about this and all those memories (lost in time like tears in rain) and all that sense of wonder back in the 90ies here and then and always hoped I could one day get back into this game again.
I do believe that the dynamic structure of the story is still special until today, even if today more games are doing it. But playing Disco Elysium, more than once I thought that Blade Runner was basically building the fundament for a game like this.
"Fundament" sounds like the right word for this remake, @valcoholic.
What a pity. Really enjoyed this way back when. Making it worse it quite an achievement.
I'm an hour in and I like it, but as the review mentions that menu interface is beyond awful, I can't yet figure out to even read clues...
Really want to play this as I'm a huge fan of the film, but the reviews have really put me off. I might get it when like most Limited Run published games usually do, when it hits down to a couple of quid
As a big fan of blade runner, this is very disappointing. I hear that the pc port on gog is far better, so I might look into getting that to run on my crummy old laptop.
“Hideous and pointless graphical upscaling” —I think I’m not a graphics/frame rate snob, but I play games for fun. This doesn’t look playable.
For once this isn't an issue with the Switch at all. This "remaster" is just awful all around. Despite Nightdive's great track record, this one just doesn't cut it, even on PC.
However, the original game is actually really good. The best way to play it is by using SCUMMVM, which received a carefully reverse-engineered engine for this game a while back. If you buy the Enhanced Edition on GOG, you get the original game alongside it, which you can then use with SCUMMVM. (GOG used to sell the original version but was removed when the 'Enhanced Edition' was released.)
I had such high hopes for this game to be good. I can't remember how often I played the original back in the day, but it seems I should leave the past be and just hold on to the good memories, instead of diving into this poor version. Sad times for a big Blade Runner fan (and a big fan of the novel it was all based off "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" by Philip K. Dick).
Just started and will probably finish Gamedec, by then hopefully a patch or 2 will be out for this
@TheGameSquid wdym for once?
GTA trilogy was trash on all platforms.
@anoyonmus My bad for making a confusing statement, it's just that people sometimes think the Switch gets the short end of the stick because it's underpowered, I meant to say this has nothing to do with that and this remaster is bad on all platforms.
I guess this will be a steam deck pick for me.
@Ara
Remasters sell themselves on their enhanced graphics.
These aren't enhanced, they might be higher resolution, but at the cost of detail. At that point, it's not worth the effort.
I can do these sorts of upscales from my desktop using my RTX 3070 and a bit of digging around and learning on Github.
I can manually tinker with the results to get a desired outcome, but it still relies on learning, understanding, and applying the processes which many of these remasters are failing to do.
Deckard: The reviewers wrote it up as "Standard butchered cash grab of a vintage computer classic", which didn't make me feel any better about the remaster developers shooting themselves in the foot.
@Rambler I mean its less than 10 bucks here in europe so I'll put it on a watchlist and if it gets a discount it becomes a nobrainer to me;
Well here's the first Nightdive game I won't be buying. Hopefully they do better next time.
On a side note, I cannot comprehend how assets and source code can be lost. If I was a self-respecting developer I’d employ someone in charge of archiving all projects and keeping any equipment around that would be necessary to reopen them in the future. We’re talking about works of art, this carelessness makes me mad.
I hear that pretty much all versions of this are terrible. Best bet is to get the original PC release.
@NintendoWife losing of original assets is more common than you think. In this case we are talking about times when original assets were not stored somewhere in cloud (1997) simply because of hardware limitations. Few years later was Westwood bought by EA and moved also physically. This also did not help. Similar problem with missing assets had e.g. Diablo 2 (which was released later).
More laziness on Switch. It’s getting far too frequent now. Sick of having to hear about games being compromised for Switch
@jarvismp
It's b0rked on everything. So much so that the original PC version is back on sale
@Odined Still it would have been easy. Keep a box of tapes and some hard drives per game in the storage, done. Not worth it for a project as expensive as a video game? And I am certain the developers would have loved to keep the stuff in store, but probably weren’t allowed.
Actually I know how common this is first hand & it’s infuriating. Working in TV (music), and after a while I learned that they routinely deleted the recording projects of all the shows. We had some major stars over the years… all deleted. Did the math, and a 4TB drive would have been enough to keep it. It is carelessness.
And (back on topic) of course, a change of ownership / shutting down / insolvency makes things a thousand times harder.
@NintendoWife I had the same experience, back in the Nineties I worked on some TV shows that had freaking fantastic musical guests and they weren't even considering saving the recordings of the music. In some cases, the sound guys made their own private recordings (which is highly against the rules) and those are literally the only record of some truly legendary jams that I would give an eye to have on CD these days.
Things were very different before we had virtually unlimited cloud storage for everything (although for all I know they might still not record these things due to legal issues with performance vs. recording rights).
Removed - trolling; user is banned
@JasmineDragon Yes, rights would definitely need to be cleared or negotiated before any further use or re-release. But I’d at least keep the source material - just in case! Like you say, years later nobody understands the decision to throw away a unique performance, for example.
Or, as we can see in this Blade Runner case, future standards might enable a reissue in a way higher export quality. Another puzzling case were the video sequences of Mario Sunshine in 3D All Stars. They used AI upscaling which suggests the source projects were lost as well. How? How do they not keep a Silicon Graphics workstation or whatever it was made on around? It was forgivable in the early ages of computers, but by now everybody knows that someday you’ll wanna access old stuff again.
Oh man I have been looking forward to this so much but it’s getting increasingly common to read about compromised switch versions of various games time to give us an upgrade Nintendo
@Gs69 I wonder how long before they really CAN. I mean the Tegra X1 used in the Switch was old 6 years ago when the switch released, but APU's are still underpowered and expensive. Even say the one used in the steam deck is drastically overpriced for the out given and Valve is STILL selling each unit at a loss.
Nintendo isn't one to sell at a loss ( it has happened but not often) so I wonder when that nice meeting of price and power will be available for them to jump in.
I have this and am really enjoying it but it's hard. You need a walk through because at times you will fall into trouble, a hint system should be there.
@Ratmasterd21 what you say is true and it’s not always a bad thing cos as we know Nintendo have a knack of getting the best out of their hardware and personally I don’t have a problem the switch it’s just recently I seem to be reading a lot of things about switch having to make compromises when it comes to software compared to other systems available but is that down to devs being lazy when it comes to switch ports cos Nintendo don’t often seem to struggle I have owned my switch since day 1 I just feel it needs a bit more grunt under the hood to truly compete
@Gs69 I feel the same way. I was lucky enough to get a switch day one and a light day one and an OLED day one and as much as I love them I agree with everything you said
@NintendoWife sad to hear about state of TV. And TV programs are easier to archive, because you need only one label per medium. With source code of software it is much more complicated because older programming languages didn't even made possible to separate assets from code itself. So you have one big mess of assets and code of describing how they interact. And with no or missing documentation there is also high probability that you don't know how to separate them. And fast evolution of programming languages also doesn't help.
This is surprising, given that I hold Nightdive in very high regard when it comes to remasters. I even think they're one of the few developers that get these kinds of projects right, as they generally strive to respect and preserve the original artistic intent and focus on making the graphics look good on modern displays.
@Odined Well the stations do keep the “masters”, meaning the finalized shows. And even the music mixes might be archived (only talking about our show and production company). But they needlessly deleted the projects which are more comparable to the source projects of computer games you described: Some sequencer project with lots of audio files associated and processing plugins used. The latter part is hard to keep intact over many years because software is no longer compatible or phased out. But even the raw audio multitracks would be valuable and should never be deleted.
"No instructions or hint system"
oh my ....a review written by a millenial I bet ...
Sounds like a bit of a mess. I will delete this from the wishlist. Cheers for the review. Shame this dev's general decent work has been tarnished
@Robokku
Nice kippel reference!
Awesome.
@BlackenedHalo That literally has nothing to do with the age of the reviewer. Back in the day it was common for computer games to have printed manuals with hundreds of pages. The manual for Baldur's Gate II is 263 pages - and the last page includes phone numbers for the official hint line. (Yes, I saved my manuals - at least for some games).
I'll just play the original on Steam Deck.
Luckily I already have it on GOG!
@jcboyer515 well the dev added the possibility to play the original release to alleviate the annoyances of the remaster. Maybe there are also useful mods. I'd rather just play on switch though.
I don't think the original was half as good as people seem to 'remember' it was. I played it back in the day and the game was a pain in the ass even then!
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