this post was submitted on 31 May 2026
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When Other Games Chased Polygons, Blade Runner Chased Atmosphere (lemmy.world)
submitted 7 hours ago by PerfectDark@lemmy.world to c/games@lemmy.world
12 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Just a little article from me today. I've been enjoying a few cyberpunkish things recently:

  • Psycho-Pass
  • Dark Rain
  • Cyberpunk 2077

...which reminded me that there was a semi-recent effort at bringing the classic Blade Runner PC game from 1997 to a new era of gaming. It didn't land very well (everyone hated the smoothed graphics nonsense they did for it), but on a subsequent update they did fix that.

Anyway, that recollection led to me installing it on my OLED Switch, which then made me appreciate the atmosphere and environments, the beautiful backgrounds and so on. The backgrounds in this game are truly top-notch.

SO, if you'd like a little rambling about how Westwood went against the grain when 3D gaming was really taking off, and instead focused on a point-and-click adventure, then follow the link as per usual:

https://gardinerbryant.com/when-other-games-chased-polygons/

top 12 comments
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[–] ivanafterall@lemmy.world 6 points 5 hours ago

This game blew me away. First game I recall over 1 GB, so it took me awhile to finally be able to play it. I spent so much time on that rainy balcony listening to Vangelis' Blade Runner Blues. So few games have approached its level of ambiance for me.

[–] robomuffin79@lemmy.world 6 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

Didn’t have a PC then so missed it. Anyone if it can be downloaded from anywhere? Plus Dune 2 - loved playing that on my Amiga

[–] jackal@feddit.uk 8 points 5 hours ago (3 children)
[–] Flagstaff@programming.dev 3 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 children)

This kind of review is what turns me off to the risk of buying and trying:

Blade Runner is one of those adventure games that I somehow missed when it originally came out, and I've been hearing for years how good it is, but in reality... it's not. It's got all the stuff people hated about adventure games back in the day - events that can result in insta-death, "puzzles" that don't make sense in the narrative, countless ways to soft-lock your game...

It's so infuriating to just be getting into the vibe of the game, only to loop back round every location, speak to every person, examine every clue, finally turn to a walkthrough, realize you did everything right but for whatever random bugged reason the characters who are supposed to spawn just sometimes don't spawn and there is nothing you can do. Searching online you can find message board posts going back almost 30 years complaining that they got stuck in some place or another and the only solution is to restart the game from the beginning and hope the random number generator doesn't mess up your playthrough again. Epic waste of time.

I can totally see how you might get lucky and have a playthrough where there is no soft-lock, and have an awesome time. The graphics are excellent and the cyberpunk aesthetic is spot-on. But making an adventure game with random bugged elements is such a self-own, and the age of this one is no excuse - by 1997 LucasArts had already been putting out modern adventures for 5+ years! I can't really recommend this unless you are a massive Blade Runner fan, it's just too frustrating by today's standards.

... versus just watching someone who has already perfectly figured out the game play through it on YouTube, for free.

[–] thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

Watching a video playing someone else is not the same as playing yourself, thinking about next steps, solving puzzles and immerse into the action by your own hand and decision. This is not a game like Mixtape where watching a video is equivalent to "playing" it.

No game is perfect and one can have fun with games that have bugs (i don't know how buggy this game is) or logic problems. Getting stuck or frustrated is not alwasy a bad thing to me, and no I am not sarcastic. If you don't have the nerves for this kind of thing, then this game is not for you (again I did not play the game, but I played other oldschool click adventures).

Don't get me wrong, i absolutely understand the critique and I am glad people point that out. (user reviews are important)

[–] Flagstaff@programming.dev 2 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

I'm not trying to avoid frustration itself, of which there are many subtypes; you're talking to someone who loves FTL and Noita, which are among the most brutally tough roguelites in existence, haha.

There's a tremendous difference between the challenges posed in those games versus pixel-hunting in point-&-click games; while this game doesn't seem to impose literal pixel-hunting, the numerous soft locks sound certainly more aggravating, especially due to RNG (in a point-&-click?!).

The point-&-click Technobabylon—which mostly comprises a series of self-contained escape rooms(/buildings) to avoid sprawling misses of key, tiny items—is a great example of how to naturally solve this problem. I wished more point-&-click games followed its style.

[–] thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

I can't talk about how this game in particular is designed, but agree on oldschool point & click adventures having often nonsensical puzzles and solutions. I'm not a fan of that too. And critique is rightfully so. I just don't know to what extend and if those are really softlocks or just getting stuck and not finding a solution. It's like calling some online player cheater, just because it "looked like cheating", as an analogy.

My point is, if this was a real big problem, then more people would probably talk about it. That's where I come from.

[–] robomuffin79@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours ago

🙏🏼

[–] massive_bereavement@fedia.io 1 points 4 hours ago

Wasn't there some drama related to the enhanced version, similarly to what happened with Gabriel Knight?

[–] thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 2 points 4 hours ago

The first cyberpunk (with magic and fantasy mixed) game I played was Shadowrun on the SNES. The Blade Runner game is definitely something a game I missed back then and wish had experienced it in that time period. Maybe I prefer the ScummVM version based on Windows CD with 1.8gb size, just so I can play it in RetroArch with my favorite configuration and shaders to mimic an old screen.