Blade Runner is one of the most representative films of the genre and the cyberpunk style, a film that had Harrison Ford as the main character, being one of the best characters of his career and also one of his best films. Due to the success there were many products derived from this franchise, even years later they made a sequel to the 90's film, Blade Runner 2049 (which I haven't seen yet). So it was not surprising that a few years after the release of the first film they developed a video game based on this varied and original universe. Being this videogame one of the best graphic adventures in the videogame industry.
Today's Retro Review is about: Blade Runner.
In this videogame, unlike its filmic counterpart, we don't follow the adventures of Rick Deckard (the main character in the film). Instead, the game introduces us to Ray McCoy, another Blade Runner, but this time he's a rookie. The Blade Runner is a special police force that investigates and neutralizes fugitive Replicants. Replicants are androids created in the likeness of a human being, with abilities superior to those of a normal person, ranging from strength, agility and in some cases (when necessary) present greater intelligence.
Due to this similarity to an ordinary human being, makes them very difficult to recognize and identify, so the work of a Blade Runner is difficult and necessary.
The story of this video game begins when rookie Ray MCcoy is assigned a case of investigation into a murder that occurred in a pet store. All this investigation brings with it a series of events in the style of the movie, where a group of replicants will be involved in totally dangerous matters. Just like in the movie, our main character will have to investigate and follow the clues we find in our mission, taking into account that some of the things we do during the game will have repercussions when they generate one of the 14 possible endings.
Blade Runner is a 3D game with the typical pre-rendered backgrounds, so that they manage to capture a better amount of details, in addition to having an excellent level of decoration in the purest cyberpunk style, so the dark tones but also the neon lights play a great role in the atmosphere of this game. This videogame manages to recreate in a phenomenal way all the futuristic aspect that we could see in the movie.
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Just seeing a little bit of this game you can notice behind its development there was a great work, because this is a very ambitious game for its time and you could say that it was very advanced graphically for the year that Blade Runner was released.
Each scenario presents a very well cared design, in terms of details and modeling, many of these scenarios visually are impressive to see and for a game of the 90's is a really great merit, that few have the ability to achieve. Having scenarios with such good details and a quite outstanding level of decoration, makes every place we go (or at least in many of them) can reach a level of immersion quite deep, due to what this game can transmit thanks to its excellent setting and futuristic atmosphere, but at the same time with the look of the Noir genre.
Being a videogame set at some point in the future or at least in the future version of the creator of this franchise, we will be able to witness many "futuristic" aspects, as well as flying cars, robots and many neon lights. Really this videogame makes you feel inside the Blade Runner universe and that one game is capable of that, makes the experience we have playing it a better and personal one.
Blade Runner, like its namesake on the big screen, is specially composed with ambient tunes, which accompany us (the player) throughout this futuristic adventure full of neon lights. In addition to having electronic tunes, which range from more relaxing musical tones, to more tense and that can make us feel tension at times. The soundtrack of this videogame can be defined as a mixture of ambient sounds, with a lot of use of synthesizers that make us allude to a futuristic world and also remind us in certain aspects of the Vaporwave genre. One of my favourite bands in a graphic adventure and in videogames in general.
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Blade Runner is a graphic adventure, so we will control our main character using the Point and Click mode, so characteristic of video games in this genre. The interface is quite minimalist and does not occupy almost any space on the screen, so this gives us the possibility of being able to observe the stage well in search of something that will serve us in our research or simply visualize the excellent scenarios that this game has to offer.
This game has a quite curious system since we can choose the mood of our protagonist, Ray MCcoy, so that when we are talking to someone in search of some kind of information, he will give us a series of questions, depending on the mood we have chosen previously, in such a way that this game gives us a series of possible answers and questions that we can ask, in turn, according to what we do, how we do it, that is, the way we get that information or the way we perform some action, will have repercussions at the time of unlocking any of the various possible endings that are in this title.
The level of exploration and freedom that you feel in this game, is very different from other graphic adventures, in Blade Runner there's a greater freedom at the moment of being able to perform certain actions, as well as being able to investigate and get information, that as we get some kind of information or the way we get it, as I said before, different things are going to happen in the adventure, so this game has a fairly high level of re-playability compared to other games of the same genre.
I am short of words with this game, as it offers so much more than I have mentioned in this review. Blade Runner can be considered as one of the best graphic adventures to date and is always overshadowed by others like Monkey Island, which is a pioneer in its genre, but Blade Runner is a video game that at the time was quite an ambitious project and achieved much of what it set out to do. I think it's pretty obvious to say that it's a videogame that I recommend without any doubt, it's a great experience that comes from a rather mythical film universe of popular culture.
